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Psychical Miscellanea

Being Papers on

'Psychical ^Research, Telepathy,
Hypnotism, Christian Science, etc.

• BY

J>ARTHUR HILL

Author of " Psychical Investigations" " Man is a Spirit"
" Spiritualism ; Its History, Phe?wmena and Doctrine" etc.

NEW YORK:
HARCOURT, BRACE & HOWE,

1920

X

Printed in England

1 ' ^kf

PREFACE

MANY friends and correspondents have sug-
gested that I should republish a number of
articles which have appeared from time
to time in various quarters. The present volume
brings these articles together, with some which have
not appeared before.

Each chapter is complete in itself, but there is more
or less connexion, for each deals with some aspect of
the subject to which I have given most attention
during the last twelve years — namely, psychical
research.

I thank the editors of the Holborn Review, National
Review, World's Work, and Occult Review for permission
to republish articles which have appeared in their
pages.

J. A. H.
Thornton,
Bradford.

CONTENTS

PAGE

DEATH ------ I

IF A MAN DIE, SHALL HE LIVE AGAIN ? - - II

PSYCHICAL RESEARCH ; ITS METHOD, EVIDENCE,

AND TENDENCY - - - I 8

THE EVOLUTION OF A PSYCHICAL RESEARCHER - 43

DO MIRACLES HAPPEN ? - - - "52

THE TRUTH ABOUT TELEPATHY - - 58

THE TRUTH ABOUT HYPNOTISM - - 63

CHRISTIAN SCIENCE - - - - 75

JOAN OF ARC - - - - 88

IS THE EARTH ALIVE ? - - - "94

RELIGIOUS BELIEF AFTER THE WAR - - III

Psychical Miscellanea

DEATH

OUR feelings with regard to the termination
of our earthly existence are remarkably
varied. In some people, there is an abso-
lutely genuine and strong desire for cessation of
individual consciousness, as in the case of John
Addington Symonds. Probably, however, this is met
with only in keenly sensitive natures which have suffered
greatly in this life. Such unfortunate people are
sometimes constitutionally unable to believe in any-
thing better than cessation of their pain. Anything
better than that is " too good to be true ", so much
too good that they hardly dare wish for it. Others,
who have had a happy life, naturally desire a con-
tinuance of it, and are therefore eager, like F. W. H.
Myers, for that which Symonds dreaded. Others,
again, and these are probably the majority, have no
very marked feeling in the matter ; like the good
Churchman in the story, they hope to enter into ever-
lasting bliss, but they wish you would not talk about
such depressing subjects. This seems to suggest that
they have secret qualms about the reality of the bliss.
Perhaps they have read Mark Twain's Captain Storm-
field's Visit to Heaven, and, though inexpressibly shocked
by that exuberant work, are nevertheless tinged with a
neaking sympathy for its hero, who found the orthodox

2 DEATH

abode of the blest an unbearably dull place. The
harp-playing in particular was trying, and he had
difficulty in managing his wings.

Anyhow, these people avoid the subject. As Emer-
son says somewhere, religion has dealings with them
three times in their lives : when they are christened,
when they are married, and when they are buried.
And undoubtedly its main appeal is in the period prior
to this third formality, if they happen to have a longish
illness. The rich Miss Crawley, in Vanity Fair, is
typical of many. In days of health and good spirits,
this venerable lady had " as free notions of religion
and morals as Monsieur de Voltaire himself could
desire " ; but when she was in the clutches of disease,
and even though in the odour of sanctity, so to speak
— for she was nursed by Mrs Reverend Bute Crawley,
who hoped for the seventy thousand pounds if she
could keep Rawdon and Becky off the doorstep —
even with this spiritual advantage she was in much
fear, and " an utter cowardice took possession of the
prostrate old sinner ".

Well, let those laugh who will. As for me, I have
great sympathy with Miss Crawley. Probably those
who laugh, or are contemptuous of such cowardice,
are people who have not yet come to close quarters
with death — have not looked him, as the French say,
in the white of the eyes. Let them wait until that
happens. If they come back after that rencontre,
they will be a little more tolerant of the cowardice of
those whom they called weaker brethren.

Fear of death may be divided into classes, according
to its cause, i.e., the intellectual state out of which it
seems to arise. It may be due to the expectation of
physical suffering ; or, as in such cases as Cowpers
and Dr Johnson's, to expectation of what may happen

DEATH 3

after death, in that undiscovered country from which
Hamlet said no traveller returned, though he had just
been talking with his father's ghost, piping hot — as
Goldsmith has it in his Essay on Metaphor — from
Purgatory. In my own case, I think the fear is a little
of both. And I admit that in both directions the fear
is irrational. As to the physical part, it is probable
that when my time comes I shall depart without much
of what is usually called pain, for the heart seems
to be my weak place, and I may reasonably hope that
even though if attacked by other ailments, it will be
the heart that will give way. There will probably
be suffering through difficulty of breathing, and I
dread this somewhat, for I know how unpleasant it
has been in the attacks which I have survived. Still,
it can hardly be compared with the agonising pain of
many diseases. Rationally, then, I ought not to have
much fear on the physical side.

On the spiritual side I confess with Oliver Wendell
Holmes that I have never quite got from under the
shadow of the orthodox hell. I had a Puritan upbring-
ing, not severe in its home theology I am thankful to
say, but involving attendance at an Independent Chapel
where the minister— a good man and no hypocrite —
was wont to preach very terrible sermons. I shall
never quite get over the baneful effect of those dam-
natory fulminations. They branded my soul. They
caused me more pain than anything else has ever done
throughout my life — and this is saying a great deal.
They made me hate God. Remember, I was a de-
fenceless child. I knew of no other God. I thought
all decent people believed like those about me. I was
the only heretic — a rebel, an outlaw, an Ishmael.
Conceive, if you can, the agony of a sensitive child
struggling with that thought ! Condemned to eternal

4 DEATH

torment, with those who, in Dante's terrible line,
" have no hope of death." (" Inferno/' iii, 46.)

Then I fell in with O. W. Holmes's Autocrat and
Professor, and found a friendly hand in the darkness.
It led me to Emerson and Carlyle ; then I found
Darwin, Spencer, and the rest of them. My loneliness
was mitigated, but the seared place in my soul was
not healed, and never will be healed. I cannot read
the Inferno and Purgatorio of Dante without horror,
and thus the poetic beauty of those great cantos is
darkened for me. I cannot worship " God," for
" God " is the fiend whose image was stamped into
my mind in its most plastic, most defenceless period.
Truly that early teaching has much to answer for. It
has poisoned a great part of my life. I suppose if I
could have " accepted " that Being as my God,
accepting also the sacrifice — the Blood — by which
that Being's anger was supposed to be assuaged —
I suppose I should have been happy, feeling myself
" saved." (But I have lately been surprised to find
how ineffective this belief can be. An acquaintance
of mine, an orthodox churchwoman who has no religious
doubts, and who talks much of the Bible, confesses
to " a fear of death which clouds even her brightest
moments " — an ever-present, unconquerable dread.)
However, I could not accept the dogma. Why, I
don't know. Somehow my whole mind and heart
revolted against the entire plan of salvation. I never
believed any of it. I felt it could not be true. And
yet it tortured me. Illogical ? Yes : human beings
are illogical. I am no exception. The Christian who
believes he will go to heaven is equally illogical in his
unwillingness to die.

When or if we succeed in getting rid of hell, the
spiritual fear of death becomes less torturing, remaining

DEATH 5

only as a vague dread, as in Hamlet's soliloquy. Bacon
says that we fear death as children fear to go in the dark.
In my own case, it is somewhat thus that the fear now
presents itself. The old hell-fear, though not utterly
obliterated, is becoming less all-swallowing. This
very desirable state of affairs is partly the result of the
conclusions to which I have been led by psychical
research. After many years of experiment and close
study, I can say that I know something about after-
death conditions. Not that I pretend to be able to
coerce other people into a similar belief, even if I wanted
to. Each must travel his own path. Moreover,
psychical research being a science, its results are not
more certain than those of other sciences. Alternative
theories in explanation of any phenomenon are always
possible. There is no such thing as knock-down
proof. But for my part I can say that I know — in
the same way that I know the truth of Mendeleef's
law, or Avogadro's law, or Dalton's atomic theory —
that human beings do not become extinct when they
die, that they are often able to communicate with us
after that event, and that they are not in any orthodox
heaven or hell. My knowledge is based partly on a
lengthy and carefully-conducted series of sittings which
some intimate friends of mine have had with a
medium known to me ; partly on my own results over
a period of several years of systematic investigation ;
and partly on various curious experiences of psychic
friends of mine who are in no sense professional
mediums. (Details to some extent in my New Evidences
in Psychical Research (Rider, 1911) and Psychical In-
vestigations (Cassell, 1917.) I now believe, with the
Bishop of London, that a man is essentially the same
five minutes after death as he was five minutes before.
As the old woman says in David Copper field, " death

6 DEATH

doesn't change us more than life "— no, nor as
much !

The upshot is, of course, that my spiritual fear of
death has, I am thankful to say, almost vanished.
The lurid future has taken on a milder radiance.

It is not that I want assuring of " happiness " in a
future state as compensation for misery in this. I
should be quite contented if I could be assured that
death is annihilation. It would at least be a cessation
of suffering ; and that is much. I could agree with
Keats :

" Darkling I listen ; and, for many a time
I have been half in love with easeful Death,
Called him soft names in many a mused rhyme,
To take into the air my quiet breath.
Now more than ever seems it rich to die,
To cease upon the midnight with no pain
While thou art pouring forth thy soul abroad

In such an ecstasy.
Still wouldst thou sing, and I have ears in vain —
To thy high requiem become a sod ! "

— (To the Nightingale)

Easeful death — it is a good word. Keats knew
disease, and was content with prospect of ease ; though
at the end there is a note of depression or despair at
the thought of becoming a " sod," deaf and blind to
beauty.

This reminds us of the attitude of other poets to-
wards the great problem. Tennyson is mildly opti-
mistic and placid ; stretches, indeed, somewhat lame
hands of faith in his sorrowful moments when his
friend has died, but on the whole is healthily disposed ;
friendly to the most cheerful way of looking at it ;
inclined, with true British burliness, to make the best
of a bad job — a job which, after all, may not be so very
bad when we come to closer quarters with it. Afar,
death is the spectre feared of man; seen nearer, he

DEATH 7

may metamorphose into a beautiful Iris, sent by
heavenly mercy. And, afterwards, the new spiritual
state will probably be an improvement — Aeonian
evolution through all the spheres. Therefore, away
with all selfish mourning either about our own prospec-
tive fate or that of those who have left us. Let us
hate the black negation of the bier :

" And wish the dead, as happier than ourselves
And higher, having climb'd one step beyond
Our village miseries, might be borne in white
To burial or to burning, hymned from hence
With songs in praise of death, and crowned with flowers."

No doubt Tennyson was to a very great extent able
to stay himself on the personal mystic experiences
described in his poem The Ancient Sage — experiences
which gave him a subjective assurance that death
was " a ludicrous impossibility ". Browning, char-
acteristically buoyant, was ready to face death with a
laugh ; the fog in the throat will pass, the black
minute's at end, then thy breast. In Prospice we
feel the eager sureness with which he looked forward
to rejoining her whose bodily presence had left him a
few months before. But even Browning's cheery
salutation is outdone by Whitman. The American,
though acquainted with suffering as Browning was not,
and though apparently without much belief or interest
in personal survival, was almost uncannily friendly
to his own taking off. And it was not because he
suffered so greatly that he hailed release. It was more
the natural outcome of his joyous temperament, sub-
dued at the last to a kind of solemn exaltation. The
following stanzas were written with George Inness'
picture The Valley of the Shadow of Death in mind :

11 Nay, do not dream, designer dark,
Thou hast portray'd or hit thy theme entire ;
I, hoverer of late by this dark valley, by its confines, having
glimpses of it,

8 DEATH

Here enter lists with thee, claiming my right to make a symbol too.
For I have seen many wounded soldiers die,
After dread suffering — have seen their lives pass of! with smiles,
And I have watch'd the death-hours of the old ; and seen the

infant die
The rich, with all his nurses and his doctors ;
And then the poor, in meagreness and poverty ;
And I myself for long, O Death, have breath'd my every breath
Amid the nearness and the silent thought of thee.

" And out of these and thee,
I make a scene, a song (not fear of thee,

Nor gloom's ravines, nor bleak, nor dark — for I do not fear thee,
Nor celebrate the struggle, or contortion, or hard-tied knot),
Of the broad blessed light, and perfect air, with meadows, rippling

tides, and trees and flowers and grass,
And the low hum of living breeze — and in the midst God's beautiful

eternal right hand,
Thee, holiest minister of Heaven — thee, envoy, usherer, guide

at last of all.
Rich, florid, loosener of the stricture-knot called life,
Sweet, peaceful, welcome Death."

This is indeed a change from the idea of Death as
King of Terrors, as " spectre feared of man ". (In
Memoriam)

The Greek idea, at its best, seems to have been half-
way between the two extremes. It regarded death
with more or less equanimity, as being certainly not
the greatest evil — no king of terrors — but merely an
emissary of greater Powers, to whose will we must bow,
though with dignity :

" He that is a man in good earnest must not be so mean as to
whine for life, and grasp intemperately at old age ; let him leave
this point to Providence." — (Plato : Gorgias)

Sophocles has the same thought, with an added
touch of Hamlet-like irritation about the slings and
arrows of outrageous fortune :

V It is a shame to crave long life, when troubles
Allow a man no respite. What delight
Bring days, one with another, setting us
Forward or backward on our path to death ?
I would not take the fellow at a gift
Who warms himself with unsubstantial hopes ;
But bravely to live on, or bravely end,
Is due to gentle breeding. I have said." — (Ajax)

DEATH 9

Cicero voices the same pagan feeling, in the contented
language of a rather tired, wise old man :

" I look forward to my dissolution as to a secure haven, where I
shall at length find a happy repose from the fatigues of a long
voyage." — (De Senectute)

And was it not Cato— fine old Stoic — who, finding
his natural force abating, and accepting the hint
furnished by a stumble in the street, stooped and
kissed the ground : " Proserpine, I come ! " and
went home, making a speedy end, unwilling to suffer
the indignity of disease and the shame of being served
in weakness ? Modern opinion wisely reprobates
suicide, but there is something noble in the Roman
attitude, condemn it as we will. As a modern and
almost comic example of a modern Stoic's attitude to
this same question of death we may cite the famous
lines of Walter Savage Landor :

" I strove with none, for none was worth my strife,
Nature I loved, and, next to Nature, Art,
I warmed both hands before the fire of life,
It sinks, and I am ready to depart/'

" Strove with none ", indeed ! As a matter of fact,
Landor strove with everybody. He was one of the
most quarrelsome men that ever lived. The only
man who could tolerate him was Browning. But
in his mellower moments, at least, he was " ready to
depart ", quietly acquiescing in the scheme of things.
To depart, note ; not to be extinguished. And this
view is, all things considered, the most sane and whole-
some view of the great problem of Death. We did not
begin to live when we were born in this present tene-
ment of flesh ; we shall not cease to live when we quit
it. Tis but a tent for a night, an interlude, a descent
into matter, a temporary incarnation for educative
purposes, of the soul or a part of it, as it pursues its

B

io DEATH

lone way towards the ineffable goal. This life is but
a sleep and a forgetting ;

" The soul that rises with us, our life's star,
Has had elsewhere its setting, and cometh from afar."

Death, then, is to be welcomed when it comes. We
must not run to meet it, or run from it ; but we should
welcome it when God thinks fit to send it,His messenger.
The beautiful eternal right hand beckons, and the soul
gladly arises and departs, to " that imperial palace
whence it came ", or to fare forth on some " adventure
brave and new ".

IF A MAN DIE,
SHALL HE LIVE AGAIN?

A FRIEND of mine tells me that psychical
articles are always interesting, " because
so many people die and go somewhere".
Presumably, those who remain here feel a natural
curiosity as to where the departed have gone, partly
for the latter' s sake, and partly because they them-
selves would like to know, so that they will know
what to expect when their own time comes.

The teaching of religion on this point is admittedly
either rather vague, or, if definite — as with the Augus-
tinian theology — no longer credible. We have pro-
gressed in sensitiveness and humanity, and can no longer
believe that a good God will inflict everlasting torment
in a lake which burneth with fire and brimstone, even
on the most wicked of His creatures. Still less can we
believe in such punishment being inflicted for the " sin
of unbelief ", for we now know well enough that
" belief ", being the net outcome of our total experience
and character, is not under the control of the will.
Consequently, a God who punished creatures for not
believing, when He knew all the time that He had so
constructed most of them that they could not believe,
would be either wicked or insane. This inability to
believe " to order " is plainly perceived if we reflect
on what our feelings would be if a Mohammedan im-
plored us to believe in Allahand in Allah's Prophet,
as the only way of salvation. We should decline,

12 IF A MAN DIE

saying perhaps that we knew better ; but the real
reason of our disbelief would not lie in our knowledge
but in our general make-up. We could not believe
in Mohammedanism if we tried. We have grown
up in a different climate, and have taken a different
form.

But,putting aside the vindictive hell-god of Augustine,
Tertullian, Calvin, and the rest — for not even an
earthly father would punish a child for ever — and
taking Christianity at its best, we do not find any very
specific eschatological teaching. And this very absence
is a good feature. If a man tries to be good merely
in order to avoid hell and gain heaven — in other words,
because it will pay — his goodness is not much of a
credit to him. It is only selfishness of a far-sighted
kind. Religion, on the other hand, when at its best,
seeks to influence character, not by threats and pro-
mises, but by encouraging moods and attitudes and
habits of thought from which good actions will flow
spontaneously, without any profit-and-loss calculations.
Modern Christianity is therefore perhaps right in touch-
ing much more lightly on the future state than was
customary in earlier centuries.

Nevertheless, we cannot repress a little curiosity.
People die and go somewhere, as my friend says. Where
do they go ? Modern Religion having avoided definite
answer, we turn to Science. And Science, much as it
would surprise such fine old gladiators as Huxley
and Tyndall to hear it — has an answer, and an affirma-
tive one.

Psychical research has, in my opinion, brought
together a mass of evidence strong enough to justify
the following conclusions. I do not say they are
"proved". You cannot "prove" that the earth is
round, unless your hearer will at least study the

IF A MAN DIE 13

evidence. You cannot even prove to him that 2 plus
2 makes 4, if he refuses to add. Therefore I do not
say anything about proof. I say only that after many
years of careful study and investigation I am of
opinion that the evidence justifies the conclusions.

(1) Telepathy is a fact. A mind may become
aware of something that is passing in another mind
at a distance, by means other than the normal sensory
channels. The " how " of the communication is
entirely unknown. The analogy of wireless telegraphy
of course suggests itself, but is misleading. The
ether-waves employed in wireless telegraphy are
physical pulses which obey the law of inverse squares ;
telepathy shows no conformity with that law, and has
not been shown to be an affair of physical waves at all.
I believe that it is not a physical process ; that it
occurs in the spiritual world, between mind and mind,
not primarily between brain and brain. And, if so
— if mind can communicate with mind independently
of brain — the theory of materialism at least is exploded.
If mind can act independently of brain, mind may
go on existing after brain dies.

(2) Communications, purporting to emanate from
departed spirits, are sometimes so strikingly evidential
that it is scientifically justifiable to assume the agency
of a discarnate mind. For example, in a case known
to me, a " spirit " communicating through a non-
professional medium — a lady of means and position —
referred to a recipe for pomatum which the communi-
cator said she had written in her recipe-book. No
one knew anything about it ; but, on hunting up the
book, the deceased lady's daughters found a recipe
for Dr Somebody's pomade, which their mother had
evidently written shortly before her death. They
confirmed that " pomatum " was the word which their

14 IF A MAN DIE

mother used. The points to be noted are : That the
medium was not a professional ■ that no one who knows
her has doubted her integrity ; that she was not
acquainted with either the deceased lady or her
daughters ; that the knowledge shown was not pos-
sessed by any living (incarnate) mind, and is therefore
not explainable by telepathy ; and, finally, that the
case was watched and reported on by one of our ablest
investigators- a lecturer at Newnham College— who
found no flaw in the evidence.1 I repeat that I do not
claim this to be "proof". I give it merely as an
illustration, and will give a few more detailed cases
in a later chapter. For the present I must be content
to say that the mass of evidence known to me justifies
the belief that minds survive what we call death.

The question then arises : What is the nature of the
after life ? And here we are faced with great difficul-
ties. We can ask the returning spirits, but we cannot
verify their statements. If my uncle John Smith
purports to communicate, I can test his identity by
asking him to tell me intimate family details which I
can verify by asking his widow, who still lives ;
but I cannot thus check his statements about
his spiritual surroundings. Still, if he has proved his
identity — particularly if telepathy seems excluded —
we may perhaps feel fairly safe in accepting his other
statements as true, or at least in admitting their
possible truth. And of course we can obtain the
statements of many different spirits, and can compare
them. This has been done. The result is a striking
amount of uniformity. The various spirits agree,
on the main points.

First of all, they are surprisingly unorthodox ! They

1 Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research, vol. xvii,
PP. 181-3.

IF A MAN DIE 15

tell of no heaven or hell of the traditional kind. There
is no sudden ascent into unalloyed and eternal bliss for
the good — who, as Jesus pointed out, are not wholly
good — and no sudden plunge into eternal fires for the
bad — who, similarly, are not unqualifiedly bad. There
is much of bad in the best of us, and much of good in
the worst of us. Accordingly, the released soul finds
itself not very different from what it was while in the
flesh. It has passed into a higher class of the universal
school— that is all. Tennyson has the idea exactly :

" No sudden heaven, nor sudden hell, for man,
But through the Will of One who knows and rules —
And utter knowledge is but utter love —
Aeonian Evolution, swift or slow,
Thro' all the Spheres — an ever opening height,
An ever lessening earth."

I have said that this view is unorthodox, and so it
is, if compared with the orthodoxy of Calvin
or Edwards or Tertullian. But it is pleasant to
find that orthodoxy to-day is a different thing, and
that the Tennysonian notion is backed up in high
quarters. The Bishopric of London is the highest
ecclesiastical office in England, after the Archbishoprics
of Canterbury and York, and we find the present
Bishop of London (Dr Winnington-Ingram) speaking
as follows :

" Is there anything definite about death in the Bible ?
I believe there is. I think if you follow me, you will
find there are six things revealed to us about life after
death. The first is that the man is the same man.
Instead of death being the end of him, he is exactly
the same five minutes after death as five minutes before
death, except having gone through one more experience
in life. In the second place the character grows after
death ; there is progress. As it grows in life so it grows

1 6 IF A MAN DIE

after death. A third thing is, we have memory. ' Son,
remember ', that is what was said to Dives in the other
world. Memory for places and people. We shall
remember everything after death. And with memory
there will be recognition ; we shall know one another.
Husband and wife, parents and children. Sixthly,
we still take great interest in the world we have left ".

The good Bishop gets all this out of the Bible, and
quite rightly. We hope no heresy-hunter will accuse him
of " selecting " his texts and ignoring the hell-fire ones.

So far as earth-language can go, the foregoing
represents the probable truth regarding the after life.
If we inquire for details, we shall get nothing very
satisfactory. If we ask a spirit concerning what he
does — how he occupies himself — he will either say he
" cannot explain so that you will understand " or will
tell about living in houses, going to lectures, teach-
ing children, and the like. All this is obviously
symbolical. Any communications that a discarnate
entity can send must, to be intelligible to us, be in
human earth-language ; and this language is based
on sense-experience. After death, experience is differ-
ent, for we no longer have the same bodily senses —
eyes, ears, etc. : consequently no explanation of the
nature of spiritual existence can be more than ap-
proximately true ; yet such expressions as living in
houses, going to lectures, and the like, may be as near
the truth as earth-language can get. If a bird tried to
describe air-life to a fish, the best it could do would
be to say it is something like water-life, but there is
more light, more ease of movement, more detail, more
things of interest and beauty. Of the wonders of sound
—skylark's song, human choruses, instrumental sym-
phonies— no idea could be conveyed to the fish. Prob-
ably our friends in the next stage of existence have,

IF A MAN DIE 17

in addition to the experiences which they can partly
describe, other experiences of which they can give us
absolutely no idea. They have been promoted. Their
interests and activities have become wider, their joys
greater. Yet they are the " same " souls, as the
butterfly is the " same " as the chrysalis from which it
has arisen. But to know exactly what it feels like to
be a butterfly, the caterpillar and chrysalis have to wait
Nature's time. So must we.

PSYCHICAL RESEARCH: ITS METHOD,
EVIDENCE, AND TENDENCY

SPIRITUALISM and Psychical Research are to
the fore just now, and there is much newspaper
and vocal discussion, based for the most part
on ignorance, particularly as regards the violent
attackers of these things. It is desirable that exact
knowledge of the subject should become more general,
and in a recent volume I have tried to review the whole
subject impartially.1

But there are many who in these stressful days have
no time for even one volume on this kind of thing,
and for them, or such of them as may read this, I have
tried in the present article to give an idea of what
psychical research is, on the spiritualistic side, omitting
the medical side which concerns itself with suggestive
therapeutics. The article was first written as a paper
which was read before a society of clergy in Bradford,
whose request for it was a significant and pleasing
indication that ministers are aware of the importance
of the subject. They are realising that psychical
research is a powerful support to religious faith, and
that its results provide comfort for the bereaved. We
live in a scientific age, and the sorrowing heart asks for
more than a text and an assurance that it is God's will
and all for the best ; it asks whether it is a fact that
the departed one still lives and knows and loves,

1 Spiritualism : Its History, Phenomena, and Doctrine (Cassell &
Co., Ltd.).

9

PSYCHICAL RESEARCH 19

whether it is well with him, and whether there will be
reunion " over there ". Psychical research enables
us to answer these questions in the affirmative. Science
is now backing up religion, and is providing ministers
with by far the best weapon against materialism and
so-called rationalism. It meets these negative 'isms
on their own ground, and does not need to take cover
under intuition or personal religious experience, which
are convincing only to the experient. I am not be-
littling these ; I am only saying that the phenomenal
evidence is more potent for the scientific type of mind,
and that a knowledge of this evidence is useful to those
who are defending religion.

TELEPATHY

It is found by experiment that ideas can be com-
municated from mind to mind through channels other
than the known sensory ones. Professor Gilbert
Murray of Oxford, probably the most famous Greek
scholar in this country, recently carried out some
interesting experiments of this kind in his own family.
He would go into another room, leaving his wife and
daughter to decide on something which they would
try to communicate to him on his return. They chose
the most absurd and unlikely things, but in a large
number of cases Professor Murray, by making his mind
as passive as possible and saying the first thing that
came into his head, was able to reproduce with startling
accuracy the idea they had in mind. For instance,
they thought of Savonarola at Florence and the people
burning their clothes and pictures and valuables.
Says Professor Murray : "I first felt ' This is Italy',
then, ' this is not modern ' ; and then hesitated, when
accidentally a small tarry bit of coal tumbled out of

20 PSYCHICAL RESEARCH

the fire. I smelt oil or paint burning and so got the
whole scene. It seems as though here some subcon-
scious impression, struggling up towards consciousness,
caught hold of the burning coal as a means of getting
through".1 On another occasion they thought of
" Grandfather at the Harrow and Winchester cricket
match, dropping hot cigar-ash on Miss Thompson's
parasol ". Professor Murray's guess, reported verbatim,
was : " Why, this is grandfather ! He's at a cricket-
match — why it's absurd: he seems to be dropping
ashes on a lady's parasol ". Another time they thought
of a scene in a book of Strindberg's which Professor
Murray had not read : a poor, old, cross, disappointed
schoolmaster eating crabs for lunch at a restaurant,
and insisting on having female crabs. Professor
Murray says : " I got the atmosphere, the man, the lunch
in the restaurant on crabs, and thought I had finished,
when my daughter asked : ' What kind of crabs ? '
I felt rather impatient and said : ' Oh, Lord, I don't
know : female crabs.' That is, the response to the
question came automatically, with no preparation,
while I thought I could not give it. I may add that
I had never before heard of there being any inequality
between the sexes among crabs, regarded as food."

This kind of evidence is not the best, because the
thoughts of members of one family run more or less
in similar grooves ; though the experimenters recognised
this and chose unlikely things purposely. Other
investigators have sometimes used cards, drawing one
at random from a shuffled pack, looking at it, and the
percipient then trying to say what it is. The chance
of success is of course one in fifty-two, and the amount

1 Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research, vol. 29, p. 59.
(For brevity's sake I shall hereinafter use the recognised initials
" S.P.R." for the Society.)

\

PSYCHICAL RESEARCH 21

of success which we might expect by chance in any
series can be mathematically determined. In one
series of successful experiments conducted by Sir
Oliver Lodge the odds against an explanation by chance
alone were about ten millions to one. In ordinary
matters this would be regarded as proof.

Other experiments of the same general character
have been carried out by Sir William Barrett, Professor
Sidgwick, and others, and details may be found in the
S.P.R. Proceedings. In most cases the idea comes into
the mind as an impression, but if the percipient is a
good visualiser it is sometimes seen almost externalised
as a hallucination. This leads us to the next step.

If it is possible to convey to another mind — some-
times so vividly that the thing is almost seen as if out
there in space— an image of scenes thought about, may
it not be possible to convey an image of oneself ? This
idea occurred to a gentleman referred to by Myers as
Mr S. H. B. in his book Human Personality and Its
Survival of Bodily Death. Mr S. H. B., whom I know
by correspondence and whose brother I have known
personally for many years, decided that he would try
to make himself visible to two young ladies whom he
knew, and he concentrated his mind on the effort
just before going to bed. He willed to show himself
in their room at one o'clock in the morning. The
distance from his house to theirs was three miles. Next
time he saw them, a few days later, they told him they
had had a great fright : the elder sister had seen Mr
B.'s apparition, had screamed and awakened her little
sister, who also saw him. The time was one o'clock in
the morning. They told him this before he said
anything about his experiment, and they had no reason
to expect that he would try anything of the kind
Both Mr B. and his brother are keen and successful

22 PSYCHICAL RESEARCH

business men ; Mr S. H. B. is now retired, his brother
is still the head of a large firm. I mention this because
some critics seem to have a notion that psychical
researchers are a crowd of long-haired poets or semi-
lunatic cranks.

PHANTASMS OF THE DEAD

Now if a living man can by force of will project
a telepathic phantasm of himself, it is reasonable to
suppose that a dead man can do the same, if the so-
called dead man still exists ; for telepathy does not
seem to be a physical process of ether-waves, does not
conform to the law of inverse squares or propagate
itself in all directions as physical forces do. It seems
to occur in the mental world, between mind and mind
rather than between brain and brain. Consequently,
telepathy from the dead is likely to be easier than from
the living, for they over there are not clogged with the
fleshly body. Certainly, however they may be ex-
plained, there are many cases of the apparition of a
deceased person. The difficulty about accepting the
evidentiality of some of them is that if the percipient
knew that the person appearing was dead, the appari-
tion may be merely a subjective hallucination. And
even if the death was not known, it might be surmised,
and the apparition might be the result of expectancy
if the person appearing was known to be ill or in danger.
But there are some cases in which a certain amount
of detail is conveyed, rendering a subjective explanation
not very probable. For instance, Captain Colt had a
vision of his brother, in a kneeling position, with a
bullet wound in his right temple. He described the
vision to several people in the house before any news
came, so the case does not rest on his word alone. In

PSYCHICAL RESEARCH 23

due time information arrived that his brother had been
killed. He had been shot through the right temple,
had fallen among a heap of others, and was found
in a kneeling position. In his pocket was a letter from
Capt. Colt asking him, if anything happened to him,
to make his presence known in the room in which as a
matter of fact the apparition was seen. The vision,
it was found, occurred a few hours after the death.
Mr Myers gives full details in Human Personality.
In this case the bullet-wound and the kneeling position
are points of correct detail which are hardly explicable
on a subjective theory. The best sceptical theory is
that the incident was telepathic, the wounded brother
sending out his telepathic message after being shot.
This is possible, but hardly probable ; for death in the
case of a bullet-wound through the temple must be
almost instantaneous.

Spontaneous cases of this kind and of this degree
of evidentiality are rare, but there is a large mass of
evidence of the same general character. The S.P.R.
once carried out an extensive inquiry, receiving answers
from 17,000 people, and tabulating the results in a
volume of the Proceedings. The final conclusion,
expressed in weighed and guarded words, was that
" Between deaths and apparitions of the dying person
a connexion exists which is not due to chance alone".
This was signed, among other members of the Com-
mittee, by Professor Sidgwick, whom Professor James
once called " the most exasperatingly critical mind
in England". Some of the apparitions occur before
the person's actual death, but usually in such cases
he is already unconscious and the spirit practically
free. As to those occurring after, the main difficulty
about admitting them as proof of survival is, as just
said, the possibility that although they may appear

24 PSYCHICAL RESEARCH

after the death of the person, the telepathic impulse
may have been sent out before, and may have remained
latent for some time in the mind of the percipient.
This has been carefully considered by investigators,
and in many cases there are reasons for regarding it
as an insufficient theory. On the whole, the evidence
tends more and more to suggest that in at least some
instances these happenings are due to the agency of a
discarnate mind. The proof is cumulative, and no
single case can be crucial. There is no coerciveness
about it, and each can invent his own hypothesis. But
those who have considered the subject most carefully
have come to the provisional conclusion that the agency
of the so-called dead is in some cases a reasonable,
and indeed the most reasonable, supposition. There
are of course many narratives of this kind in the Bible,1
the Lives of the Saints, and other literature, but these
records, being of pre-scientific date, and lacking the
corroborative testimony which we now require, are of
a lower order of evidentiality. The new evidence,
however, is throwing a backward light on many of these
ancient stories, and making them credible once more.
To me personally, the Bible is a much more living book
than it used to be. I believe that many things in it
which I used to regard as myths may have been facts.

NORMAL CLAIRVOYANCE

There are instances, then, of people occasionally
having visions which seem to be in some way caused
by departed persons. Sometimes the percipient has
only one experience of the kind in his life ; more often
he has several, for this seeing power is somehow tempera-
mental— a sort of gift, like the alleged second sight of

1 E.g., Moses and Elias on the Mount.

PSYCHICAL RESEARCH 25

the Highlander. It was well known to St Paul, as
his reference to " discerning of spirits " shows (1 Cor.,
xii). With some people the experience is fairly com-
mon. And in a very few persons the gift is so strong
that it is to some extent under control. I say to some
extent, and I wish to use words very carefully and to
have them understood very clearly at this point. I
know several people* who by putting themselves into
a passive and receptive condition, but without any
trance state, can generally get evidential messages
from somewhere ; that is, messages embodying facts
which the sensitive did not normally know. And some
of this matter seems to be due to telepathy from the
dead. But it cannot be done at will. I believe that
professional mediums who sit for all comers for a fee
are often, and indeed generally, quite honest people,
but that they cannot distinguish between their own
imaginations and what really comes through. Pro-
fessor Murray, when saying what came into his head,
did not know whether it was right or not ; that is,
he did not know, until he was told, whether he had
really got the thing telepathically or whether it was an
idea thrown up by his own imagination. So with
professional mediums. They give out the ideas that
come to them, but as a rule they cannot distinguish ;
and, the power not being entirely under control, there
is often a large mixture of their own imagination.

I have, however, the good fortune to be acquainted
with a sensitive who has the unusual power of being
able to distinguish ; and this is a great advantage,
rendering verbatim note-taking much easier, and elim-
inating any necessity for balancing hits against misses.
If nothing comes, he sits silent or talks ordinarily.
If he gets anything, it is practically always correct.
The amount of his success varies, and he will not sit

C

26 PSYCHICAL RESEARCH

for people in general. I know many people who have
asked him to visit them, offering handsome payment,
but he usually declines. He says he cannot do it to
order, and would be upset if he failed and caused disap-
pointment. He comes to me, however, because I
understand and always tell him that he need not worry
if he gets nothing. In fact the meeting is regarded
as a social call and not as a stance. We talk for a while
about ordinary things, and in half-an-hour or so, if
the medium can get his mind placid enough and is in
good trim generally, he will begin to see and describe
spirits present, often getting their names and all sorts
of details. These come for the most part in flashes,
and I take down every word he says, in shorthand,
without giving any help or indication as to whether
he is right or wrong. Sometimes in a whole afternoon
he will have only one or two of these gleams, and on
one occasion he got nothing. With conditions at their
best he will talk almost continuously for an hour, the
flashes following each other closely ; and sometimes
a spirit will remain visible for several minutes, moving
about the room. About a dozen of these interviews are
described in detail in my book Psychical Investigations,
and other investigations of the same sensitive by two
very able friends of mine in another town are des-
cribed in New Evidences in Psychical Research,

Perhaps one or two illustrative incidents may make
things clearer.

The first time Wilkinson came to see me he said,
in the middle of ordinary talk, that he saw with me
the form of a woman who looked about fifty-four, and
whom he described, saying further that her name was
Mary. Taking up a piece of paper and a pencil, he
wrote in an abstracted manner the words " Round-
field Place ". He looked at it, without reading it

PSYCHICAL RESEARCH 27

aloud, then said : " That will be* a house", and pro-
ceeded to write something else. I got up to look, and
found " Roundfield Place. Yes " (the " Yes " written
in answer to his remark u That will be a house ") and
a signature " Mary ". Now it happens that my
mother's name was Mary, that the description applied
to her, and that she died, in 1886, at Roundfield Place,
not the house to which Wilkinson came, whither we
removed in 1897. Other similar things were said,
about other deceased relatives, all true.

In this kind of thing it is our duty to stick to known
causes before admitting unknown, and my first sup-
position was that Wilkinson had primed himself with
information. He could have ascertained most of the
things by local inquiry, though it would not be very
easy, for my mother had been dead twenty- two years,
and only middle-aged or elderly people would remember
her. Further interviews with him, however, soon
carried me beyond the fraud theory — for holding which
I now apologise to him, feeling considerably ashamed
— for he gave me messages from many people whose
association with me I feel sure he did not know, and
also some family matter of a very private kind, char-
acteristic of the spirit who purported to be communicat-
ing, but known to only four living people. I then
fell back on telepathy, assuming that the medium was
reading my mind. But, pursuing my investigations,
I received information which I did not know but
which turned out true. For example, Wilkinson on
one occasion described a Ruth and Jacob Robertshaw,
giving details about them and saying that Ruth had a
very spiritual appearance, with a sort of radiance about
her, indicating that she had been a very good woman,
and giving other particulars. All this meant nothing
to me, for the names were unknown. But, as I had

28 PSYCHICAL RESEARCH

on some other occasions found that spirits were des-
cribed who were relatives of my last visitor, I asked
the person who had last entered the room— except
inhabitants of the house — whether she had known
people of these names. It turned out that they were
connexions of hers with whom she had been in close
touch during life, and everything said by the medium
was correct. Now in the first place this incident ruled
out fraud, for Miss North's visit had occurred three
days before, and Wilkinson would have had to have
detectives watching both doors of my house, from first
thing in the morning to the last thing at night, to find
out who my last visitor had been ; or he would have
had to be in league with a servant or a neighbour, and
even thus could hardly have succeeded, for servants
are sometimes out — moreover, similar things have
happened during the regime of different servants—
and neighbours could not easily watch both doors
during dark winter evenings. Further, our neighbours
are friends of ours, non-spiritualists, and not acquainted
with Wilkinson. And, after getting to know who my
last visitor was, information about her deceased rela-
tives would have had to be hunted up. I could give
further reasons for believing that fraud was an unten-
able hypothesis, but I must be brief. What, next,
about telepathy ? Well, I had no conscious knowledge
of these people, so the medium could not have got his
information from my conscious mind. It is possible
to assume that I knew it subliminally, and that the
medium abstracted it from those hidden levels of my
mind. This is a guess, but a legitimate guess. It is
the guess that Miss Dougall (author of Pro Christo el
Ecclesia) makes in criticising this very incident in the
book of essays called Immortality, by Canon Streeter
and others. She suggests that on the occasion of Miss

PSYCHICAL RESEARCH 29

North's visit my mind had photographed the contents
of hers, without my knowing it, and that the medium
developed the photograph and read off the required
information. It may be so, but it seems to me far-
fetched. Miss Dougall, I may add, is a member of the
S.P.R., and her criticism is instructed criticism, worthy
of careful attention. But I cannot accept her theory,
which seems to me more wonderful and to require
more credulity than the spirit theory. For it is to be
observed that the assumed mind-reading is of a char-
acter quite different from anything that has been
experimentally established. In telepathic experiments,
like those of Professor Murray, some incarnate person
is trying to communicate the thought. This is not the
case in my sittings with Wilkinson. I am not trying
to communicate anything to him ; very much the
contrary. And I do not find, after long and careful
observation, any parallelism between what he says and
what I happen to be thinking about. There is, in
short, no evidence for the supposition that my mind is
read. The evidence points unmistakably to discarnate
agency — telepathy from the dead.

TRANCE

The sort of thing I have described is usually known
as normal clairvoyance, because the sensitive is in a
normal state, not in trance. But there is a further
stage, into which, indeed, Mr Wilkinson sometimes
passes, in which there is a change of personality, and
a spirit purports to speak or write with the medium's
organs. There is nothing weird or uncanny in the
procedure, nothing deathly or coma-like ; the medium
usually sits up and even walks about, though some
trance mediums have to sit still and keep their eyes

30 PSYCHICAL RESEARCH

closed. I have had visits from many trance mediums;
and most of them have failed to get anything eviden-
tial— which at least suggests their honesty, for they
could easily have obtained some information about
my deceased relatives. But the whole matter of trance
control is a thorny problem. Indubitably, evidence
of supernormal faculty is sometimes given in this state,
but we of the S.P.R. are divided as to what the control
really is. Some think it is a spirit, as claimed ; others
think it is a secondary personality of the medium, as
in the remarkable case of split personality described
in Dr Morton Prince's book The Dissociation of a
Personality. Mrs Sidgwick, widow of the Professor
and sister of Mr A. J. Balfour, has made a careful
psychological study of the case of Mrs Piper, given in
657 pages of Proceedings, vol. 28, and her conclusion
is that though telepathy from the dead is probably
shown, and certainly some kind of supernormality,
the controls themselves are dream-fragments of the
medium's mind. I am not qualified to pronounce an
opinion on Mrs Piper, not having met her ; but as
to the trance mediums I have experimented with, I
incline to agree with Mrs Sidgwick. I think it may be
a dodge of the subliminal to get the over-anxious normal
consciousness temporarily out of the way. But this
is a psychological detail, and a difficult one, requiring
much further study. From the psychical research
point of view Mrs Piper's case may be studied in
Proceedings, vols. 6, 8, 13, 16, and a few of the later
ones, or some idea of it can be got from Sir Oliver
Lodge's Survival of Man. All the investigators were
convinced of either telepathy or something more.
Fraud was excluded by introducing sitters anony-
mously, Dr Hodgson himself introducing over 150
different people in this way, and taking careful'motes.

PSYCHICAL RESEARCH 31

I have experimented similarly with Wilkinson, intro-
ducing people from distant places such as Middlesex
and Northumberland as well as from towns nearer home,
either under false names or with no names at all, and
being present myself to take notes. Friends of mine
have done the same thing. We were unanimously
sceptical to start with, probably more sceptical than
most of those who will read this paper, for we dis-
believed in survival itself. We are now convinced
that the fraud theory is out of the question, that at the
very least a complicated theory of mind-reading —
including the reading of the minds of distant and
unknown persons — must be assumed if the theory
of survival and communication is to be avoided.

Of late years there has been a great development
in automatic writing among quite non-professional
mediums — private people who are members of the
S.P.R., as for instance the late Mrs Verrall, Classical
Lecturer at Newnham — and some noteworthy evidence
has been obtained. But it is too complex even to
summarise here. It seems to be the work of Gurney,
Hodgson, Myers, and Sidgwick, on the other side, for
different messages have come through different sensi-
tives, making sense when put together, and sense
characteristic of these departed leaders. This had
not been thought of, so far as we know, by any living
person, and it seems to eliminate telepathy from the
living, for the messages are not understood until the
bits are pieced together. The evidence fills several
volumes of our Proceedings, and students should read
them carefully.

There are many other kinds of mediumship or psychic
faculty, and many volumes are in existence on each
phase ; the library of the London Spiritualist Alliance
contains about 3,000. I have read about 500 of them,

\

32 PSYCHICAL RESEARCH

and would not recommend anyone else to do the same.
There is a great deal of rubbish among them, though
they are not all rubbish. The reading I recommend is
the Proceedings of the S.P.R., the writings of Sir
William Barrett, Sir Oliver Lodge, Dr W. J. Crawford,
and, above all, the great work of F. W. H. Myers,
Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death,
in the original two-volume edition. The abridged
one-volume edition omits many of the illustrative
cases. I do not think that conviction is to be achieved
by mere reading ; books would never have convinced
me. But careful reading is perhaps sufficient to lead
a fairly tolerant mind to realise that there is something
here which must not be dismissed off-hand ; something
which is worthy of investigation. That is as much as
we expect. Sir Oliver Lodge often says that we shall
do well if we succeed, in this generation, in modifying
the psychological climate, creating an atmosphere
more favourable to unprejudiced examination of the
facts. We have no desire for revolutions ; we want
knowledge to grow slowly and surely. The S.P.R. has
been in existence only thirty-seven years, and the
subject is in its scientific infancy. Take the beginnings
of any one science — say, Chemistry, dating it some-
what arbitrarily from Priestley or Dalton — and note
what a little way discovery had gone in a like period.
With increased numbers of workers the pace increases ;
but in every science the progress at first must be slow.
In psychical research a good start has been made, and
the investigators seem to be certain]; lrpn the track
of something, whether their inferences are right in every
detail or not. And every advance in science has
extended our conceptions of this wonderful universe.
The heavens declare the glory of God in a tremend-
ously larger way than they did in the days of the old

PSYCHICAL RESEARCH 33

Ptolemaic astronomy, though man foolishly fought the
Copernican idea because it seemed to lessen our
dignity., by making our earth a speck on the scale of
creation instead of the central body thereof. So with
all other phenomena, physical and psychical. We
may be sure that all discovery will be real revelation.
With this faith — a well-grounded faith — we need not
fear advance.

RECENT CRITICISM

I add a few words, rather against my inclination,
about recent criticism of a kind which is hardly worthy
that name. Two books, one by Dr Mercier and one
by Mr Edward Clodd, have had a certain popularity,
mainly because they attacked, with a certain smartness
of phrase, the book of a greater man. " Raymond "
was being widely read and talked about, and its popu-
larity secured some success for these hostile books.
Curiously enough, even some of the clergy have quoted
approvingly some of the arguments of these rationalists,
no doubt much to the glee of Mr Clodd in particular.
Now I have said before that instructed criticism is
always welcome, for we may hope to learn something
from it. But Dr Mercier, on his own statement,
came new to the subject at the age of sixty-four, read
Raymond and The Survival of Man, and immediately
sat down to write a flippant book the publication of
which we hope he now regrets. Not only had he never
investigated f. nimself, but he was also ignorant of
the work of the S.P.R.

As to Mr Clodd, his book is better-informed,
though frequently unfair. For instance, in his re-
ferences to me he is very careful to avoid any con-
sideration of the strong parts of my case. Like the

34 PSYCHICAL RESEARCH

famous theological professor, he looks the difficulties
boldly in the face — not very boldly — and passes on,
without speaking to them. He has obviously read
fairly widely, but where he does criticise in detail, he
always seizes on weak points and quietly ignores the
strong ones. As to personal investigation he is almost
entirely without experience. He says he attended a
sfeance about fifty years ago, but has forgotten most
of what happened ! He says this, with a momentary
lapse from his usual cleverness — for it gives away his
case — in a letter to the April (1918) International Psychic
Gazette. In other words, he poses as an authority on a
branch of science of which he has no first-hand know-
ledge. He criticises and dismisses airily the opinions
and investigations of those who have worked at the
subject for ten, twenty, thirty, or forty years ; for it
is over forty years since Sir William Barrett brought
his experiments in telepathy before the British Associa-
tion. Mr Clodd is a Rationalist, and knows without
investigation that these things cannot be. He is as d
prioristic as a medieval Schoolman, in spite of his
scientific pose. And his prejudices unfortunately
prevent him from seeking and studying the facts which
might lead him to other conclusions.

I have not said anything about the S.P.R. itself,
but may here add a few remarks. Says its official
leaflet : " The aim of the Society is to approach these
various problems without prejudice or prepossession
of any kind, and in the same spirit of exact and unim-
passioned inquiry which has enabled Science to solve
so many problems, once not less obscure nor less hotly
debated. . . . Membership of the Society does not imply
the acceptance of any particular explanation of the
phenomena investigated, nor any belief as to the
operation, in the physical world, of forces other than

PSYCHICAL RESEARCH 35

those recognised by Physical Science ". In other
words, the Society has no creed, except that the subject
is worth investigating.

The Society has well over 1,000 members, and is
growing steadily. It includes many famous men in
all walks of life, and indeed its membership list has
been said to contain more well-known names than any
other scientific society except the Royal Society
itself. Among the Vice-presidents are the Right
Honourables A. J. and G. W. Balfour, Sir William
Barrett, Sir Oliver Lodge, the late Bishop Boyd-
Carpenter and the late Sir William Crookes. The
President for the current year is Lord Rayleigh, prob-
ably the greatest mathematical physicist now living.1
The President of the Royal Society (Sir J. J. Thomson)
is a member, also Professor Henri Bergson of Paris,
Dr L. P. Jacks (editor of The Hibbert Journal) and
innumerable other scientists and scholars whose names
are known to everyone.

Finally let me assure you that the S.P.R. is so con-
servative and suspicious that admission is almost as
difficult to obtain as membership of a high-class London
club. It is extremely anxious to keep out cranks and
emotional people of all sorts, and it requires any
applicant to be vouched for as suitable by two existing
members ; and each application is separately con-
sidered by the Council. The result is a level-headed
lot of members, and the maintenance of a sane and
scientific attitude and management.

From the philosophic side it is sometimes urged
that we cannot reason from the phenomenal to the
noumenal, from the world of appearance to the world
of reality ; that consequently nothing happening in

Lord Rayleigh's lamented death has since occurred, July, 1919,

36 PSYCHICAL RESEARCH

the material world can prove the existence of a spiritual
one. But this is easily answered. We cheerfully
agree, with Kant, that a spiritual world cannot be
proved coercively and in such knock-down fashion
that belief cannot be avoided. But it can be proved
in the same way and to the same extent as many other
things which we believe and find ourselves justified
in believing. For instance, atoms and electrons and
the Ether of Space are not phenomenal ; no one has
ever seen or heard or felt or smelt them ; but we infer
their real existence from the behaviour of the matter
which does affect our senses. Again : we cannot
prove to ourselves that other human beings exist, or
even that an external world exists ; my experience
may be a huge subjective hallucination. If I were
reading this paper I should not be able to prove to
myself that any other mind was present. Looking
around, I should receive certain impressions — sensa-
tions of sight — and I should call certain aggregations
of these the physical bodies of beings like myself. From
the similarity of their structure and behaviour to the
structure and behaviour of my own body, I should
infer that they have got minds somehow associated
with them, as my mind is associated with my body.
But you could not prove it to me. If you got angry
with my obstinacy, and knocked me down, I should
experience painful sensations, but the existence of a
mind external to me — and an angry one — would still
be a matter of inference only. But we find that the
inference is justified. We find that it " works/' and
social life is possible. For the purposes, then, both
of science and of ordinary life, we do reason from
phenomenon to noumenon, from appearance to reality,
from attribute to substance ; and our reasoning
justifies itself. I affirm, therefore, that the kind of

PSYCHICAL RESEARCH 37

proof which we as psychical researchers put forward
for the existence of and communication from discarnate
minds, is philosophically the same kind as the proof
we have of the existence of incarnate minds. If a
short and clear exposition of the point is required, free
from ajiy psychical-research bias, I may refer inquirers
to the chapter on the Psychological Theory of an
External World in J. S. Mill's Examination of Sir
William Hamilton's Philosophy. Our evidence may be
insufficient to justify belief — in the opinion of many,
it is — and I blame no one for disbelieving ; but it is
evidence. And if it sufficiently accumulates and im-
proves in quality, it may amount to a degree of proof
at least comparable with that concerning electrons,
which are now accepted as real by all physicists.
One or two difficulties may here be briefly referred to :
1. The appearance in Mrs Piper's script of such
obvious dream-stuff as messages from Homer, Ulysses,
and Telemachus ! These are of course absurdities, and
no psychical researcher regards them as anything else.
But they are no more absurd than many of our own
dreams, and we must remember that automatic writing
comes from the dream-strata of the medium's mind,
these strata seeming to lie between our normal conscious-
ness and the spiritual world. Consequently messages
which really seem to come from beyond : i.e., which
are evidential— are often mixed with subliminal
matter from the medium's mind. As a communicator
once said : " The medium's dreams get in my way ".
All this has to be allowed for, but in good mediums
there is not much of it. In my friend Wilkinson's
case there is none, for he can distinguish. In Mrs
Piper's case there is a little, but it does not invalidate
the huge mass of real evidence that has come. And
it at least testifies to her honesty, for no medium would

^

38 PSYCHICAL RESEARCH

pretend to get messages from people whom everyone
knows to be mythical — messages which are indeed
comic and therefore enable opponents to score points
with the general public by obvious witticisms.

Huxley is often referred to, as having wisely declined
to investigate, knowing beforehand that it was all non-
sense. Huxley was busy with his own work, and,
believing a priori that alleged psychical phenomena
were either fraud or self-delusion, naturally declined
to give any time to them. We need not regret his
decision, for he was doing work that was more important
than psychical investigation would have been, just
then. But he was wrong in his d priori belief, or rather
unbelief. He had nevei seen any of these'phenomena,
but that did not prove that they did not|happen. A
native of mid-Africa may never have seen snow,
but that does not prove that no snow exists.

And it happens that the Dialectical Society went
on with its task, appointing committees which in-
vestigated without any paid medium. The majority
of the investigators were utterly sceptical at first ;
they were practically all convinced at the finish. I
state this merely as a fact, not as a specially important
fact ; for I find that beginners, when suddenly faced
with striking phenomena, are liable to go from the
extreme of unbelief to an extreme of belief. When one's
materialistic scheme is exploded, there seems no
criterion left, and anything may happen. It usually
takes an investigator a year or two to adjust himself
and to learn to follow the evidence and not over-
shoot it.

Some people say : " But if communication is possible,
why cannot / communicate direct with my own de-
parted loved ones ? " The question is seen on reflec-
tion, however, to be easily answered. In the first

PSYCHICAL RESEARCH 39

place, we cannot communicate direct even with our
friends in the next town ; we have to get the help of
postmen or telegraph clerks and the like. It is there-
fore not at all surprising that an intermediary is
needed when they are removed further from our
conditions. Probably all of us have germs of psychic
faculty — though I have not yet discovered any in my-
self— somewhat as we can all play or sing a little ;
but the Paderewskis and Carusos are few. Similarly
with psychic faculty. Few have enough of it to com-
municate for themselves. On the other hand, it is
much commoner than Carusos are ; but of course, when
it occurs in a private person, that person does not
advertise the fact. Outsiders would either scoff, or
say " lunacy ",or crowd round asking for " sittings ",
out of curiosity. Consequently only sympathetic
intimates are told, or people who, like myself, are known
to be sympathetic investigators. Some of the most
remarkable sensitives in England at the present day
are of this private kind — people of education and
position — and they are not even spiritualists in the
sense of belonging to the spiritualist sect. They are
of various religious persuasions, and belong mostly
to rather orthodox bodies. There is nothing of the
crank about them ; they are not Theosophists or
Christian Scientists or adherents of any other of what
the sergeant called " fancy religions.' ' I may say that
the most extraordinary experiences I have ever had
have been with a psychic of this kind. I have not
alluded to these experiences in my paper, because the
matter is private. But I just mention these things
because I find that psychic faculties are more common
than I once thought, and a sympathetic minister could
probably hear of private cases if he let his sympathy
and interest be known. But of course, if he is known to

40 PSYCHICAL RESEARCH

have condemned the whole thing as Satanic — as Father
Bernard Vaughan does — or as lunacy, people with
psychic experiences will take very good care not to
tell him about them.

As to details about the nature of the after-life, I
have no dogmatic opinions to offer. Probably it is
impossible for those over there to describe their ex-
perience adequately, in our earthly terms. Such in-
formation as we get must be largely symbolical, as
when mediums describe a specially good deceased
person as surrounded with radiance. I have several
times noticed that the relative " brightness " or
" radiance " of a spirit, as described by the medium,
has correctly indicated that spirit's character, though
the medium had no normal knowledge whatever of
either the person's character or even existence. But
though our information must probably be mainly
symbolical, I think we are justified in believing that
we begin the next stage pretty nearly where we leave
off here. There is no sudden jump to unalloyed bliss
for even such good people as you, no sudden plunge
to everlasting woe even for sinners like me. This,
I admit, is not in accordance with what I used to hear
from the pulpit twenty years ago. But it agrees with
what I read now of the opinions of such men as the
Bishop of London and Dr J. D. Jones ; and other
clerical writers, such as Canon Storr in his Christianity
and Immortality and Dr Paterson Smyth in his
excellent Gospel of the Hereafter take the same view.
Our modern moral sense refuses to believe that a good
God will sentence any creature to everlasting pain ;
and although it may be contended that man has free-
will and is therefore the arbiter of his own fate, it still
remains that God gave him that freedom, and therefore
still bears the ultimate responsibility. To retain

PSYCHICAL RESEARCH 41

belief in a God who can be loved and worshipped, I at
least must disbelieve in everlasting pain for anyone.

And, added to this moral revolt, there has come a
war in which millions of young men have died before
their natural time. These young fellows, we feel,
are at least in most cases neither good enough for heaven
nor bad enough for hell. The sensible supposition
seems to be— and it is borne out by psychical facts — -
that the}/ have gone on to the next stage of life, which
to most or all of them is an improvement ; that they
are busy and happy there ; that they are still more or
less interested in and cognisant of our affairs ; that
they will come to meet their loved ones when they
cross over — of this I have had much evidence — and
that they and humanity as a whole are travelling on
an upward path toward some goal at present incon-
ceivable to our small and flesh-bound souls.

Some people have objected that psychical research
will substitute knowledge for faith. This is surely
a curious objection, and few will advance it. The
earth is the Lord's and the fulness thereof, and my
belief is that He wants us to learn all we can about
His handiwork. Nature is a book given to us by our
Father, for our good ; study of it is a duty, neglect
of it is unfilial and wrong. Psychical research studies
its own particular facts in nature, and is thus trying
to learn a little more of God's mind. It is not we, but
those who oppose us, who are irreligious.

And as to this matter of faith ; well, after we have
learnt all we can, there will still be plenty of scope left
for the exercise of faith in general, for our knowledge
will always be surrounded by regions of the unknown.
If anyone says that psychical research antagonises
Christian faith, I say most emphatically that on the
contrary it supports it. Christianity was based on a

D

42 PSYCHICAL RESEARCH

Fact : the Resurrection and Appearances of Jesus.
Psychical-research facts are rendering that event
credible to many who have disbelieved it. Myers says
that in consequence of our evidence, everyone will
believe, a century hence, in that Resurrection ; where-
as, in default of our evidence, a century hence no one
would have believed it. And to him, personally,
psychical research brought back the Christian faith
which he had lost.

I hope that the facts and inferences which I have
very sketchily put before you will have made it clear
that there is some reality in the subject-matter of our
investigations, and that these latter powerfully support
a religious view of the universe. I believe that we
are giving materialism its death-blow ; hence the wild
antagonism of such well-meaning bat belated writers
as Mr Clodd. But we are not ourselves religious
teachers. That is your domain. You will use our
work and its results, as you use the work and results
of other labourers in the scientific vineyard. And I
think you will find ours specially helpful.

THE EVOLUTION OF A PSYCHICAL
RESEARCHER

PROBABLY few of us keep a diary nowadays.
I don't. But I somehow got into the habit,
soon after I became interested in psychical
things, of jotting down in a notebook the conclusions
at which I had arrived — or the almost complete puzzle-
ment in which I found myself, as the case might be.
Glancing recently through these records of my pilgrim-
age, it seemed to me that a sketch of it might be of some
interest or amusement to others.

Professor William James says in his Talks to Teachers
that it is very difficult for most people to accept any
new truth after the age of thirty ; and that indeed old-
fogeyism may be said to begin at twenty-five. It is
perhaps therefore not surprising that, coming fresh
to the subject at thirty- two — in 1905 — I found the
struggle to psychical truth a very long and arduous
affair. Having been brought up on the ministrations
of a hell-fire-preaching Nonconformist pastor whose
theology made me into a very vigorous Huxleyan
agnostic, I was biased against anything that savoured
of " religion," and moreover " spiritualism " was un-
scientific and absurd. So I thought, in my ignorance ;
for I knew nothing whatever of the evidence on which
spiritualistic beliefs are based.

However, I fortunately ran up against hard facts
which soon cured me of negative dogmatism. I became
acquainted with a medium who satisfied me that she

44 EVOLUTION OF A RESEARCHER

could diagnose disease, or rather her medical " control "
could, from a lock of the patient's hair ; and this with-
out any information whatever being given. Also
that the diagnosis often went beyond the knowledge
of the sitter, thus excluding telepathy from anyone
present or near. But this did not prove that the con-
trol was a spirit, so I turned to other investigations.

First, I set myself to " read up ". I feel sure that this
is the best course for beginners to adopt, after once
achieving real open-mindedness. It enables one to
investigate with proper scientific care when opportunity
arises, and with much better chance of securing good
evidence. Without this preparation, an investigator
has little idea how to handle that delicate machine
called a medium, and indeed no amount of reading
will entirely equip the experimenter, for there are
many things which only experience can teach. Also,
without this preparation, the investigator will be liable
either to give things away by talking too much, or will
create an atmosphere of suspicion and discomfort
by being too secretive. It takes some practice
to achieve an open and friendly manner while never
losing sight of the importance of imparting no informa-
tion that would spoil possible evidence. This of course
is desirable from the medium's point of view as well as
that of the sitter. It is hard on a medium if, for ex-
ample, a really supernormally-got name does not count
because the sitter himself had let it slip.

I think my reading began with Light and some of
Mr E. W. Wallis's books, but I soon found my way to
the Proceedings qf the Society for Psychical Research,
and recognised that here was what I was seeking. I
cannot sufficiently express my admiration, which is as
great as ever, for such masterly pieces of evidence as,
for instance, Dr Hodgson's account of sittings with

EVOLUTION OF A RESEARCHER 45

Mrs Piper, in volume 13. If we were perfectly logical
beings, without prejudice, that account ought to con-
vince anybody ; certainly it ought to convince the
reader of the operation of something supernormal, and
it ought to go a long way towards excluding telepathic
theories and rendering the spirit explanation the
most reasonable one. But we are not logical beings.
We require to be battered for a long time by fact after
fact before we will admit a new conclusion. I re-
member saying, as indeed I noted down in the diary
mentioned, that a few of these volumes, with Myers's
Human Personality, left me in the curious position of
being able to say that, though I was not convinced,
I felt that logically I ought to be, for the evidence
seemed irrefragable. Then I read Crookes' Researches
in the Phenomena of Spiritualism, and my logical
agreement was accentuated, for Sir William Crookes
was my scientific Pope, in consequence of my having
worked from his chemical writings, and having
an immense admiration for his mind and method.
But my actual inner conviction was not much
changed. Kant saj/S somewhere that we may
test the strength of our beliefs by asking ourselves
what we would bet on them. At this point I had not
got to the stage of being prepared to bet much on the
truth of the survival of human beings or the possibility
of communicating with them if they did survive. I
thought the case was logically proved, but I didn't
feel it in my bones, as the phrase goes. For this,
personal experience is necessary ; at least it is for an
old fogey of over thirty, with my particular build of
mind.

And I was fortunately able to get this experience.
One of the two best-known mediums in the North of
England, Mr A. Wilkinson, happened to live only a

46 EVOLUTION OF A RESEARCHER

few miles away, though he was and is generally away
from home, speaking for spiritualist societies from
Aberdeen to Exeter, and being booked over a year
ahead. However, I was able to get an introduction
to him through friends who also carried out investiga-
tions with him (described in my New Evidences in
Psychical Research) , and since then, with intermissions
due mainly to ill-health, I have had friendly sittings
with him continuously. To him I owe my real convic-
tions, and for. this I cannot adequately thank him.
Without his kindness I could never have achieved
certainty ; for owing to a damaged heart I could not
get about to interview mediums, and there was no
other medium within reasonable distance. Besides,
Mr Wilkinson has stretched a point in my case, for
he does not give private sittings, preferring to confine
himself to platform work ; and I suppose he makes
an exception in my case in view of my inability. I here
once more thank him for all he has done for me.

At my first sitting with him he described and named
my mother and other relatives, whom he saw appar-
ently with me. I had no reason to believe that he had
any normal knowledge of these people ; certainly I
had never mentioned them to him, and it was in the
last degree unlikely that anyone else had. My mother
had been dead twenty-two years, and was not at all a
prominent person. Moreover, he got by automatic
writing a signed message from her, giving the name of
the house in which we lived at the time of her death,
but which we had left eleven years later. This seemed
to be given by way of a test. At later sittings my father
and other relatives manifested, with names and identi-
fying detail, and the proof began to be almost coercive.
The evidence went beyond any possibility of the
medium's normal knowledge, and was characteristic of

EVOLUTION OF A RESEARCHER 47 .

the different communicators in all sorts of subtle
ways. Telepathy alone remained as a possible alter-
native to the spirit explanation. Then came a peculiar
phase, as if there were a definite plan on the part of
some of my friends on the other side for the purpose
of utterly convincing me by bringing evidence which
could not possibly be accounted for by any supposition
of a reading of my own mind. A spirit friend of mine
would turn up, bringing with him a spirit whom I had
never heard of, and saying that he was a friend of his ;
and on inquiry I would find that it was so — and
sometimes it needed a great deal of inquiry, which
made it all the better evidence, for it showed how
difficult it would have been for the medium to obtain
the information ; though indeed at this stage the
evidence had forced me past crude suspicions of that
sort. On other occasions unknown spirits would
appear, and I would find that they belonged to the
last visitor I had had. Several incidents of this kind
are described in my book Psychical Investigations.
After some years of this kind of experience I became
fully satisfied that the spirit explanation was the only
reasonable one. Some writers, like Miss Dougall in a
recent volume of essays called Immortality , invent a
complicated hypothesis according to which my mind
photographs the mind of a visitor and the medium on
his next visit develops and reads off the photograph ;
but I confess that my credulity does not stand the
strain put upon it by such a hypothesis. Besides, I
have lately had — as if to get round even such tortured
theories as this — evidence giving details which have
not been known to any person I have ever met. I was
told to write to a certain friend of mine, father of the
ostensible communicator. The facts were unknown
even to him, but he was able to verify them completely ;

48 EVOLUTION OF A RESEARCHER

and they were characteristic and evidential of the
identity of the ostensible communicator.

If all my results were of the kind I have had through
Mr Wilkinson the case would, for me, be so utterly
and overwhelmingly proved that doubt would be
absurd. But this is too much to expect. I have
had many other mediums here, with varying success,
but nothing approaching Mr Wilkinson's. In many
cases it is fairly obvious that the medium's subliminal
— or the control's imagination — has been doing part
of the business, no doubt unknown to the medium's
normal consciousness. But in no case have I had any
indication of fraud. This seems sufficient answer
to Mr Edward Clodd's credulous acceptance of the
theory of a Blue-Book and inquiry system which
enables mediums to post themselves up about likely
sitters. It would be the easiest thing in the world
for an imitation medium to learn enough about me to
give what would seem on the face of it a fairly " good "
sitting. But this is never the case. Either the medium
fails or he is so successful that normal knowledge is
ruled out. On Mr Clodd's theory, I ought to have
neither of these extremes ; I ought to have no failures,
and no results going beyond what inquiry could pro-
duce. But I need not labour this point, for Mr Clodd
has recently confessed his almost absurd innocence
of any first-hand experience. In a letter to the
International Psychic Gazette for April, 19 18, he said
he had been to a sitting about fifty years ago, but he
does not remember much about what happened !
Yet he sets up as an authority on this branch of ex-
perimental science ! It is like someone writing on
chemistry after being in a laboratory once, fifty years
ago.

Some of my most curious experiences, concerning

EVOLUTION OF A RESEARCHER 49

which I have not yet published anything in detail,
have been in connexion with crystal vision. I happen
to know a sensitive — not a professional medium or
even a spiritualist — who has physical-phenomena powers
of very unusual and indeed probably unique type.
Not only can she see in the crystal and get evidential
messages by writing seen therein, but the writing or
pictures are visible to anyone present. I have seen
them myself. As many as six people at a time,
myself among them, have seen the same thing, and
not one of the six was of suggestible type or had had
any hallucinations. All were middle-aged, except
one young lieutenant, and we were indeed a rather
exceptionally un-neurotic and stodgy lot. But though
the things seem objective — I am going to try to photo-
graph them, also the sensitive, in the hope of confirming
the Crewe phenomena — they are somehow more or
less influenced by the sensitive's own mind, without
her conscious knowledge ; for, e.g., in one message,
purporting to come from my father, I was addressed
as Arthur, a name which would be natural to the
medium who knows me mostly from printed matter
and a few letters, but which is entirely inappropriate
in relation to my father. Yet a good deal of evidence
of identity has come through this sensitive, and this
" mixture " does not invalidate the case. Again, a
queer feature of this sensitive's powers is that lost
objects are frequently found as a result of instructions
given in the crystal ; and in many of these cases it
seems certain that the position of the lost odject could
not have been known to any incarnate mind, or of
course it would not have been left there. In one case
it was a valuable ruby ; in several others it was Treasury
notes. This sensitive also is a medium for very good
raps, which all present can hear quite distinctly and

50 EVOLUTION OF A RESEARCHER

which show intelligence, answering questions and so
forth.

I have therefore reached the conviction that human
survival is a fact, that the life over there is something
like an improved version of the present one, and — a
comforting thought, supported by much of my evidence
— that we are met at death by those who have gone
before. Some of my more mystical friends, who have
not needed such prolonged jolting to get them out of
materialistic grooves, are rather bored with me for
dwelling so much on the evidence and on the nature
of the next state. They call it " merely astral " ; as
for them, their minds soar in higher flights. One
friend, a sort of radical High Churchman, said to me
some time ago that he was " not interested in the
intermediate state". But I rather think that he will
have to be. I may be wrong, but I suspect that,
whether they like it or not, these good people will
have to go through the intermediate state before they
get anywhere else. Good though they are, I do not
believe they are good enough for unalloyed bliss or
union with the Godhead. Such sudden jumps do not
happen. Progress is gradual. Indeed, I have noticed
lately that my High Churchman friend has shown much
more interest in these merely psychical things Per-
haps he thinks he had better turn back and make sure
of the next state and its nature, perceiving that it is a
necessary bridge or " tarrying-place ,J (which is the
alternative reading for the " mansions " of our Father's
house) on the way to the heaven which he quite rightly
aims at.

As to the future of psychical science and opinion,
I feel sure that great things are now ahead. The war,
with the terrible amount of mourning it entails, has
quickened interest in the subject, and for millions of

EVOLUTION OF A RESEARCHER 51

people the question of survival and the next state
has become an urgent and abiding one. Their interest,
instead of being almost wholly on this side, is very
largely over there, whither their loved ones have gone.
Similarly with the soldiers who have come safely
through the war. All have lost friends, all have faced
the possibility of sudden or slow and painful death.
And probably all young people at present, and most
adults, have out-grown the crude beliefs of last cen-
tury's orthodoxy with its everlasting hell, and are
ready for a more rational system. This is being sup-
plied, backed by scientific proof, by psychical research
and scientific spiritualism. It seems likely that the
religion of the best minds for the next half-century or
so, and perhaps onward, will be something like that
which Myers came to hold in his later years. It does
not much matter whether the spiritualist sect grows
as an institution or not. Many people will accept its
main belief without feeling it necessary to leave the
communion to which they already belong. It seems
certain that the idea itself will be the ruling idea in
many minds for a long time, and no doubt psychic
faculty will become much more common, for thousands
are now trying to develop it who never cared to try
before. Quite possibly the effort on both sides of
the veil, in consequence of so many premature deaths,
may bring about a closer communion between the two
sides than has ever been known hitherto. A great lift-
up of earthly thought would be the result, a perhaps
final emergence from the chrysalis stage of materialism ;
and we shall then be near the time when, as the inspired
Milton makes his Raphael say :

'• Your bodies may at last turn all to spirit,
Improved by tract of time, and winged ascend
Ethereal, as we, or may, at choice,
Here or in heavenly Paradises dwell."

DO MIRACLES HAPPEN ?

MR G. K. CHESTERTON, with true journal-
istic instinct, recently stimulated public
interest in himself and other worthy
things by engineering a discussion on "Do Miracles
Happen ? " The debate furnished an opportunity
of harmlessly letting off steam, but apparently each
disputant " was of his own opinion still " at the
finish ; though some of the newspapers thought that
the affirmative was proved, not by argument, but by
the actual occurrence of a miracle at the meeting — for
Mr Bernard Shaw was present, but remained silent !
Joking apart, however, these discussions are usually
rendered nugatory by each debater attaching a different
meaning to the word. To one of them, a " miracle "
involves the action of some non-human mind ; to others
it is only a " wonderful " occurrence, which is the
strictly etymological meaning. It is only in the latter
sense that orthodox science has anything to say on the
subject.

David Hume, in the most famous of his essays, says
that a miracle is " a violation of the laws of nature ",
which laws a " firm and unalterable experience has
established". A century later, Matthew Arnold dis-
posed of the question in an even shorter manner.
" Miracles do not happen ", said he, in the preface to
Literature and Dogma. Modern science has, speaking
generally, concurred.

But the two statements are not very satisfactory.

DO MIRACLES HAPPEN ? 53

It is true, no doubt, that miracles did not enter into the
experience of David Hume and Matthew Arnold ; but
this does not prove that they have never entered
into the experience of anybody else. If I must dis-
believe all assertions concerning phenomena which I
have not personally observed, I must deny that the
sun can ever be north at mid-day, as indeed the Greeks
did (according to Herodotus), when the circumnaviga-
tors of Africa came back with their story. But if I
do, I shall be wrong. (Histories, book iv, " I for my part
do not believe them ", says even this romantic his-
torian.)

It is as unsafe to reject all human testimony to the
marvellous as it is to accept it all without question.
The modern mind has gone to the negative extreme,
as the medieval mind went to the other. Take for
instance the twenty-live thousand Lives of the Saints
in the great Bollandist collection. They are full of
miracles, of most incredible kinds ; yet in those days
the accounts caused no astonishment. There was no
organised knowledge of nature, outside the narrow
orbit of daily life— and how narrow that was, we with
our facile means of communication and travel can
hardly realise. Consequently there was little or no
conception of law or orderliness in nature, and there-
fore no criterion by which to test stories of unusual
occurrences. Anything might happen ; there was no
apparent reason why it shouldn't. One saint having
retired into the desert to lead a life of mortification,
the birds daily brought him food sufficient for his
wants ; and when a brother joined him they doubled
the supply. When the saint died, two lions came and
dug his grave, uttered a howl of mourning over his
body, and knelt to beg a blessing from the survivor.
(Cf. the curious story of St Francis taming " Brother

54 DO MIRACLES HAPPEN?

Wolf ", of Gubbio, in chapter 21 of the Fioretti.) The
innumerable miracles in the Little Flowers and Life of
St Francis are repeated in countless other lives ; saints
are lifted across rivers by angels, they preach to the
fishes, who swarm to the shore to listen, they are visited
by the Virgin, are lifted up in the air and suspended
there for twelve hours while in ecstasy they perceive
the inner mystery of the Most Blessed Trinity. Almost
every town in Europe could produce its relic which
has produced its miraculous cures, or its image that
had opened or shut its eyes, or bowed its head to a
worshipper. The Virgin of the Pillar, at Saragossa,
restored a worshipper's leg that had been amputated.
This is regarded by Spanish theologians as specially
well attested. There is a picture of it in the Cathedral
at Saragossa. (Lecky, Rise and Influence of Rationalism
in Europe, vol. 1, page 141.) The saints were seen
fighting for the Christian army, when the latter battled
with the infidel. In medieval times this kind of thing
was accepted without question and without surprise.
About the end of the twelfth century there came a
change. The human mind began to awake from its
long lethargy ; began to writhe and struggle against
the dead hand of authority which held it down. The
Crusades, as Guizot shows, had much to do with the
rise of the new spirit, by causing educative contact
with a high Saracenic civilization. Men began to
wonder and to think. Heresy inevitably appeared,
and became rife. In 1208 Innocent III established
the Inquisition, but failed to strangle the infant
Hercules. In 1209 began the massacre of the Albi-
genses, which continued more or less for about fifty
years, the deaths being at least scores of thousands ;
but the blood of the martyrs was the seed of further free-
dom and enlightenment. Nature began to be studied,

DO MIRACLES HAPPEN? 55

in however rudimentary a way, by Roger Bacon and
his brother alchemists. The Reformation came, weak-
ening ecclesiastical authority still further by dividing
the dogmatic forces into two hostile camps, and thus
giving science its chance. Galileo appeared, and did
his work, though with many waverings, for Paul V
and Urban VIII kept successively a heavy hand on
him ; he was imprisoned at seventy, when in failing
health, and, some think, tortured — though this is
uncertain, and his famous e pur si muove is probably
mythical. More important still, Francis Bacon, teach-
ing with enthusiasm the method of observation and
experiment. The conception of law, of rationality
and regularity in nature, emerged ; Kepler and Newton
laid down the ground plan of the universe, evolving
the formulae which express the facts of molar motion.
Uniformity in geology was shown by Lyell, while
Darwin and his followers carried law into biological
evolution. Then man became swelled-headed ; became
intoxicated with his successes. It had already been
so with Hume, and it became more so with his disciples.
Man treated his own limited experience as a criterion,
and denied what was not represented by something
similar therein. Especially was this the case when
alleged facts had any connection with religion. Relig-
ion had tried to exterminate science, and it was natural
enough that, in revenge, science should be hostile to
anything associated with religion. Consequently, the
scientific man flatly denied miracles, not only such
stories as the rib of Adam and the talking serpent
(concerning which even a church father like Origen
had made merry in Gnostic days fifteen hundred years
i before), but also the healing miracles of Jesus, which

to us are now beginning to look possible enough.
This negative dogmatism is as regrettable as the

56 DO MIRACLES HAPPEN ?

positive variety. It is not scientific. Science stands
for a method, not for a dogma. It observes, experi-
ments, and infers ; but it makes no claim to the pos-
session of absolute truth. A genuine science,
confronted with allegations of unusual facts, neither
believes nor disbelieves. It investigates. The solu-
tion of the problem is simply a question of evidence.
Huxley in his little book Hume, and J. S. Mill in his
Essays on Religion, made short work of the " impossi-
bility " attitude. Says the former in Science and
Christian Tradition, page 197 :

" Strictly speaking, I am unaware of anything that
has a right to the title of an impossibility, except a
contradiction in terms. There are impossibilities
logical, but none natural. A ' round square \ a ' pre-
sent past ', ' two parallel lines that intersect ', are
impossibilities, because the ideas denoted by the pre-
dicates round, present, intersect, are contradictory
of the ideas denoted by the subjects square, past,
parallel. But walking on water, or turning water into
wine, are plainly not impossibilities in this sense".

No alleged occurrence can be ruled out as impossible,
then, unless the statement is self-contradictory.
Difficulty of belief is no reason. It was found difficult
to believe in Antipodes ; if there were people on the
under side of the earth, " they would fall off ". But
the advance of knowledge made it not only credible
but quite comprehensible. People stick on, all over
the earth, because the earth attracts them more
powerfully than anything else does. Similarly with
some miracles. They may seem much more credible
and comprehensible when we have learned more.
Indeed, the wonders of wireless telegraphy, radio-
activity, and aviation are intrinsically as miraculous
as many of the stories in the world's sacred writings.

This is not saying, however, that we are to believe

DO MIRACLES HAPPEN ? 57

the latter en bloc. They must be taken individually,
and believed or disbelieved according to the evidence
and according to the antecedent probability or im-
probability. The standing still of the sun (Joshua, x)
does not seem credible to the scientific mind which
knows that the earth is spinning at the equator at the
rate of one thousand miles an hour and that any sudden
interference with that rotation would send it to smith-
ereens, with all the creatures on its surface. Of course,
a Being who could stop its rotation could perhaps also
prevent it from flying to smithereens ; but we have
to extend the miracle in so many entirely hypothetical
ways that the whole thing becomes too dubious for
acceptance. It is simpler to look on the story as a myth.
But such things as the clairvoyance of Samuel
(I Samuel, x), and even the Woman of Endor story,
are quite in line with what psychical research is now
establishing. And the healing miracles of Jesus are
paralleled, in kind if not in degree, by innumerable
" suggestive therapeutic " doctors. Shell-shock blind-
ness and paralysis are cured at Seale Hayne Hospital
and elsewhere in very " miraculous " fashion. And turn-
ing water into wine is not more wonderful than turning
radium into helium, and helium into lead, which nature
is now doing before our eyes. These things, therefore,
have become credible, if the evidence is good enough.
Whether evidence nineteen hundred years old can be
good enough to take as the basis of serious belief is
another matter. Scientific method insists on a high
standard of evidence. We must be honest with our-
selves, and not believe unless the evidence satisfies
our intellectual requirements. But the modern and
wise tendency is to regard religion as an attitude
rather than as a belief or system of beliefs. It does
not stand or fall with the miracle-stories.

E

THE TRUTH ABOUT TELEPATHY

THE amount of nonsense that is talked, and
apparently widely believed, about telepathy,
is almost enough to make one wish that the
phenomenon had not been discovered, or the word
invented. Without any adequate basis of real know-
ledge, the " man in the street " seems to be accepting
the idea of thought-transference as an incontrovertible
fact, like wireless telegraphy — which latter is responsible
for a good deal of easy credence accorded to the former,
both seeming equally wonderful. But the analogy
is a false one. There is a great deal of difference be-
tween the two. In wireless telegraphy we understand
the process : it is a shaking of the ether into pulses or
waves, which act on the coherer in a perfectly definite
way and are measurable. But in spite of much
loose talk about " brain- waves ", the fact is that we
know of no such thing. Indeed, there is reason to
believe that telepathy, if it is a fact at all — and I be-
lieve it is — may turn out to be a process of a different
kind, the nature of which is at present unknown. For
one thing, it does not seem to conform to physical
laws. If it were an affair of ripples in the ether —
like wireless telegraphy — the strength of impact would
vary in inverse ratio with the square of the distance.
The influence would weaken at a known rate, as more
and more distance intervened between sender and
recipient. And this, in many cases at least, is not found
to be so, consequently Mr Gerald Balfour and other

THE TRUTH ABOUT TELEPATHY 59

leading members of the Society for Psychical Research
incline to the opinion that the transmission is not a
physical process, but takes place in the spiritual world.

I have said that I believe in telepathy, yet I have
deprecated too-ready credence. What, then, are the
facts ?

The first attempt at serious investigation of alleged
supernormal phenomena by an organised body of
qualified observers was made by the London Society
for Psychical Research, which was founded in 1882 by
Henry Sidgwick (Professor of Moral Philosophy at
Cambridge), F. W. H. Myers and Edmund Gurney
(Fellows of Trinity), W. F. Barrett (Professor of Ex-
perimental Physics at Dublin, and now Sir William),
and a few friends. The membership grew, and the list
now includes the most famous scientific names through-
out the civilised world. In point of prestige, the
society is one of the strongest in existence.

The first important work undertaken was the col-
lection of a large number of cases of apparition, etc.,
in which there seemed to be some supernormal agency
at work, conveying knowledge ; as in the case of Lord
Brougham, who saw an apparition of his friend at the
moment of the latter's death. The results of this
investigation were embodied in the two stout volumes
called Phantasms of the Living (now out of print, but
an abridged one-volume edition has recently been
edited by Mrs Sidgwick (Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner
& Co., Ltd., 1919), and in Vol. x. of the Proceedings
of the Society. As the outcome of this arduous investi-
gation, involving the collection and consideration of
about 17,000 cases and extending over several years
of time, the committee made the cautious but memor-
able statement that " Between deaths and apparitions
of the dying person a connexion exists which is not

60 THE TRUTH ABOUT TELEPATHY

due to chance alone ". This guarded statement was
carefully worded in order to avoid committing the
society to any definite {e.g. spiritualistic) interpretation.
Some of the apparitions occurred within twelve hours
before the death, some at the time of death, and some
a few hours afterwards. But these latter of course do
not prove " spirit-agency " — though indeed sometimes
they seem to render it probable — for the telepathic
impulse or thought may have been sent out by the
dying person, remaining latent — so to speak — until
the percipient happened to be in a sufficiently passive
and receptive state to " take it in ".

Definite experimentation was also made, of various
kinds, e.g., one person would be shown a card or dia-
gram, and another (blindfolded) would maintain a
passive mind, saying aloud what ideas " came into his
head ". Some of these experiments — which are still
required and should be tried by those interested in the
subject — indicated that the concentration of A's mind
did indeed sometimes produce a reverberation in the
mind of B. In a series conducted by Sir Oliver Lodge,
the odds against the successes being due to chance
can be mathematically shown to be ten millions to
one.

For this new fact or agency, Mr Myers invented the
word " telepathy V (Greek tele, at a distance, and
pathein, to feel), and defined it as " communication of
impressions of any kind from one mind to another,
independently of the recognised channels of sense ".

But I wish to say, and to emphasise the statement,
that this transmission, though regarded as highly
probable by many acute minds, cannot yet be regarded
as unquestionably proved, still less as occurring in a
common or frequent way. We have all of us known
somebody who claimed to be able to make people

THE TRUTH ABOUT TELEPATHY 61

turn round in church or in the street by " willing M
them, but usually these claims cannot be substantiated.
It is difficult to eliminate chance coincidence. And
the folks who lay claim to these powers are usually
of a mystery-loving, inaccurate build of mind, and
therefore very unsafe guides. Moreover, how many
times have they " willed " without result ?

One reason why I deprecate easy credence, leaning
to the sceptical side though believing that the thing
sometimes happens, is, that there is danger of a return
to superstition, if belief outruns the evidence. If
the popular mind gets the notion that telepathy is
more or less a constant occurrence — that mind can
influence mind whenever it likes — there is a possibility
of a return to the witchcraft belief which resulted in
so many poor old women being burnt at the stake in
the seventeenth century. I prefer excessive disbelief
to excessive credulity in these things ; it at least does
not burn old women because they have a squint and a
black cat and a grievance against someone who happens
to have fallen ill. Unbalanced minds are very ready
to believe that someone is influencing them. I have
received quite a number of letters from people (not
spiritualists) who, knowing of my interest in these
matters, got it into their foolish heads that I was trying
some sort of telepathic black magic on them. I had
not even been thinking about them. It was entirely
their own imagination. One of these people is now in
an asylum. I think she would probably have become
insane in any case — if not on this, then on some other
subject — but these incidents almost make me wish
that we could confine the investigation and discussion
of the subject to our own circle or society until educa-
tion has developed more balanced judgment in the
masses. But of course such a restriction is impossible.

62 THE TRUTH ABOUT TELEPATHY

The daily press and the sensational novelists have got
hold of the idea. We must counteract the sensational
exaggerations, which have such a bad effect on unbal-
anced minds, by stating the bare, hard facts. Here, as
elsewhere, a little knowledge is a dangerous thing. It
is the half-informed people who are endangered. The
remedy is more knowledge. Let them learn that,
though there is reason to believe that under certain
conditions telepathy is possible and real, there is never-
theless no scientific evidence for anything in the nature
of " bewitching ", or telepathy of maleficent kind.
This cannot be too strongly insisted on. Let us follow
the facts with an open mind, but let us be careful not
to rush beyond them into superstition.

THE TRUTH ABOUT HYPNOTISM

VARIOUS popular novelists, such as George Du
Marnier in Trilby, and E. F. Benson in The
Image in the Sand, have taken advantage of the
possibilities which hypnotic marvels offer to the sensa-
tional writer, and have put into circulation a variety of
exaggerated ideas. This is regrettable. Of course the
novelist can choose his subject, and can treat it as he
likes ; it is the public's fault if it takes fiction for fact,
or allows its notions of fact to be coloured or in any
way influenced by what is avowedly no more than
fiction.

But it is certain that it is thus influenced. It is
therefore desirable that the public should be told from
time to time exactly what the scientific position is —
what the conclusions are, of those who are studying
the subject in a proper scientific spirit, with no aim save
the finding of truth. This will at least enable the public
to discriminate between fact and fiction, if it wants to.

No doubt the phenomena in question have been often
discovered, forgotten, and rediscovered ; but in modern
times the movement dates from Mesmer. Friedrich
Anton Mesmer was born about 1733 or 1734. In 1766
he took his doctor's degree at Vienna, but did not come
into public notice until 1773. In that year he employed
in the treatment of patients certain magnetic plates,
the invention of Father Hell, a Jesuit, professor of
astronomy at Vienna.

Further experiments led him to believe that the

64 THE TRUTH ABOUT HYPNOTISM

human body is a kind of magnet ; and that its effluent
forces could be employed, like those of the metal plates,
in the cure of disease. Between 1773 and 1778 he
travelled extensively in Europe, with a view to mak-
ing his discoveries better known. Also he sent an
account of his system to the principal learned bodies of
Europe, including the Royal Society of London, the Aca-
demy of Sciences at Paris, and the Academy at Berlin.

The last alone deigned to reply ; they told him his
discovery was an illusion. Apparently they knew
all about it, without investigating. There is no dog-
matism so unqualified, no certainty so cocksure, as
that of complete ignorance.

The method at first was probably a system of magnetic
passes or strokings of the diseased part by the hand of
the doctor. But, as the patients increased in number,
a more wholesale method had to be devised. Con-
sequently Mesmer invented the famous " baquet ".
This was a large tub, filled with bottles of water
previously " magnetised " by Mesmer.

The bottles were arranged to radiate from the centre,
some of them with necks pointing away from it and
some pointing towards it. They rested on powdered
glass and iron filings, and the tub itself was filled with
water. In short, it was a sort of glorified travesty of
a galvanic battery. From it, long iron rods, jointed
and movable, protruded through holes in the lid. These
the patients held, or applied to the region of their
disease, as they sat in a circle round the baquet. Mesmer
and his assistants walked about, supplementing the
treatment by pointing with the fingers, or with iron
rods, at the diseased parts.

All this may seem, at first sight, very absurd. But
the fact remains that Mesmer certainly wrought cures.
And apparently he frequently succeeded in curing or

THE TRUTH ABOUT HYPNOTISM 65

greatly alleviating, where other doctors had completely
failed. It is no longer possible for any instructed person
to regard Mesmer as a charlatan who knowingly de-
luded the public for his own profit. His theories may
have been partly mistaken, but his practical results
were indubitable.

It is also worth noting that he treated rich and poor
alike, charging the latter no fee. He was a man of
great tenderness and kindness of heart, devoted to the
cause of the sick and suffering ; and the accounts of
his patients show the unbounded gratitude which they
felt towards him, and the respect in which he was held.

The orthodox doctors, of course, felt otherwise.
They were envious and jealous of the foreign innovator
and his success. And his fame was too great to allow
of his being ignored. Consequently the Royal Society
of Medicine (Paris) appointed a commission to inquire
into the new treatment. The finding, of course, was
adverse. The investigators could not deny the cures,
but they fell back on the recuperative force of nature
(vis medicatrix natures) and denied that Mesmer s treat-
ment caused the cure.

Obviously, Mesmer, having treated his patients,
could not prove that they would not have recovered
if he had not treated them ; so his critics had a strong
position. But, on the other hand, neither can an
orthodox doctor prove that his cures are due to his
treatment. If it is vis medicatrix naturce in one case,
it may be the same in the other.

Modern medicine is more and more coming to this
conclusion — is abandoning drugging as it abandoned
bleeding and cautery, and is leaving the patient to
nature. This is a significant fact.

But there is good reason to believe that Mesmer' s
treatment was a real factor in his cures, for in many

66 THE TRUTH ABOUT HYPNOTISM

cases the patient had been treated by orthodox methods
for years without effect. Perhaps, as the doctors said,
it was " only the recuperative force of Nature ", but if
the doctors could not set that force to work, and
Mesmer somehow could, he is just as much entitled to
the credit of the cure as if he had done it by bleeding
or drugging. However, by one sort of persecution or
another, he was driven out of Paris, and more or less
discredited. After a visit to England, he retired to
Switzerland, where he lived in obscurity until his
death in 1815.

The method was kept alive by various disciples,
such as the Marquis de Puysegur, Dupotet, Deleuze,
and many more, but in an amateurish sort of way.
The first-named found that in one of his patients he
could induce a trance state which showed peculiar
features. Intrance,the man knew all that he knewwhen
awake, but when awake he knew nothing of what had
happened in trance. This second condition thus seemed
to be equivalent to an enlargement of personality.

Both in England and France the medical side came
to the front again, in the hands of Braid (a Manchester
surgeon who first used the term "hypnotism", from
Greek hypnos, sleep, and whose book Neurypnology, or
the Rationale of Nervous Sleep was published in 1843),
Liebeault, Bernheim, Elliotson, and Esdaile.

Elliotson and Esdaile still believed in a magnetic
effluence, but the idea was given up by Braid and the
" Nancy school " (the investigators who followed the
lines of Liebeault of Nancy), for it was found that
patients could be hypnotised without passes or strok-
ings or any manipulation. Braid told his patients
to gaze fixedly at a bright object, e.g., his lancet. Lie-
beault produced sleep by talking soothingly or com-

andingly, filling the patient's mind with the idea of

THE TRUTH ABOUT HYPNOTISM 67

sleep. In some cases it was found that patients could
hypnotise themselves by an effort of will (this was
confirmed more recently by Dr Wingfield's experi-
ments with athletic undergraduates at Cambridge),
and this disposed of the hitherto supposedly necessary
" magnetic effluence " from the operator.

The most modern opinion is pretty much the same.
Dr Tuckey, who learnt his method from Li6beault him-
self, and who practised for twenty years in the
West End of London, is convinced that the whole
thing is suggestion. So is Dr Bramwell, who shares
with Dr Tuckey the leading position among hypnotic
practitioners in England. The latter, it may be re-
marked, was the first qualified medical man to write
an important book on the subject in English, after
Braid.

The tendency now is to give suggestions without
attempting to induce actual trance. It is found with
many patients that if they will make their minds pas-
sive and receptive, listening to the doctor's suggestions
in an absent-minded sort of way, those suggestions —
that the health shall improve and the specified symp-
toms disappear — are carried out. The explanation
of this is " wrapped in mystery ". No one knows
exactly how it comes about. But it seems to be some-
what thus :

The complicated happenings within our bodies, such
as the chemical phenomena known as digestion and the
physical phenomena such as blood circulation and
contraction of involuntary muscles, seem to imply
intelligence, though that intelligence is not part of the
conscious mind, for we do not consciously direct the
processes. They go on all the same — for example —
when we are asleep. Presumably, then, there is a
mental Something in us, which never sleeps, and which

68 THE TRUTH ABOUT HYPNOTISM

runs the organic machinery. If we could get at this
Something, and give it instructions, a part of the
machinery which is working wrongly might get attended
to and put right. Unfortunately, the ordinary con-
sciousness is in the way. We cannot get at the mechanic
in the mill, because we have to go through the office,
and the managing director keeps us talking.

Well, in hypnotic trance, or even in the preoccupied
11 absent-minded ' ■ state, we get past the managing
director — who is asleep or attending to something else
— into the mill. We get at the man who really attends
to the machinery. We get past the normal conscious-
ness, and can give our orders to the " subconscious ,J
or " subliminal " — which means " below the thres-
hold ". In Myers' phrase, suggestion is a " successful
appeal to the subliminal self ", but exactly how it comes
about, and why the patient usually cannot do it for
himself but has to have the suggestion administered by
a doctor, we do not know.

Of course the word " suggestion " does not really
explain anything. It is a word employed to cover our
ignorance. Suggestive methods are as empirical as
Mesmer's. In each case a successful appeal is made
to the recuperative forces of nature, vis medicatrix
naturce ; but exactly how or why suggestion does it,
we know no more — or hardly any more — than we know
how and why Mesmer's baquet did it. The fact remains,
however, that the thing is done. What we lack is
only a satisfactory theory.

At one time it was thought that only functional
disorders could be relieved. But it is now recognised
that the line between functional and organic is an
arbitrary one. If we cannot find definite organic
change in tissue, we call the ailment functional ; but
nevertheless some change there must be, though micro-

THE TRUTH ABOUT HYPNOTISM 69

scopic or unreachable. Consequently even functional
disorders are at bottom organic ; and, though of course
grave lesions produce the gravest disorders, there is no
d priori impossibility in a hypnotic cure of even the
most radical tissue-degeneration.

However, as a matter of practical fact, the
" mechanic " has his limitations, like the normal
consciousness. He is not omnipotent. Consequently
we cannot be sure of being able to stimulate him to
the extent of a cure. It depends on his knowledge
and power. But he can always do something, if we
can get at him. The chief difficulty is that in many
people he is inaccessible.

For instance, I have many times submitted myself
to the treatment of Dr Tuckey and another medical
friend, without effect. I have each time tried my best
to help, making my mind as passive as I could ; for
I was sure that if a suggestible stage could be reached,
some troublesome heart symptoms and insomnia could
be alleviated. But I was never able to reach a state
even approaching hypnosis. I suppose my normal
consciousness could not put itself sufficiently to sleep.
Being interested in the scientific aspect of the subject,
my consciousness watched the process and analysed
its own sensations, instead of " letting go " and sub-
siding out of the way.

As to the proportion of susceptible persons, observers
differ. Wetterstrand and Vogt hold that all sane and
healthy people are hypnotisable, and Dr Bram well's
results among strong farm labourers at Goole support
that view. Patients with nervous ailments are difficult
to hypnotise ; out of one hundred such cases in his
London practice, Dr Bramwell only influenced eighty.
This is the percentage of susceptibles found by Drs
Tuckey Aand Bernheim also.

70 THE TRUTH ABOUT HYPNOTISM

The insane are usually unhypnotisable, probably
because of their inability to concentrate their attention.
Out of the 80 per cent, of sane susceptibles, only a
small proportion go off into hypnotic sleep ; ten
according to Tuckey, rather more according to the
experience of Bramwell, Forel, and Vogt. Most of the
susceptible, however, though retaining consciousness,
may be deprived of muscular control. For example,
if told that they cannot open their eyes, they find that
it is so.

The various " stages " of hypnosis shade gradually
into each other, and classifications are not much good.
Charcot's three stages of lethargy, catalepsy, and
somnambulism are now discredited as true stages.
In good subjects they are producible at will, and as
observed at the Salp6tri6re they were almost certainly
due to training.

I have no space for the quoting of detailed medical
cases, but it is desirable to emphasise the practical
facts and to make the subject as concrete as possible to
the reader, so I will quote just one, as illustration,
from Dr Bram well's contribution to Proceedings of the
Society for Psychical Research, vol. xiv, page 99.

" Neurasthenia ; suicidal tendencies. Mr D ,

aged 34, 1890 ; barrister. Formerly strong and
athletic. Health began to fail in 1877, after typhoid
fever. Abandoned work in 1882, and for eight years
was a chronic invalid. Anaemic, dyspeptic, sleepless,
depressed. Unable to walk a hundred yards without
severe suffering. Constant medical treatment, in-
cluding six months' rest in bed, without benefit. He
was hypnotised from June 2 to September 20, 1890.
By the end of July all morbid symptoms disappeared,
and he amused himself by working on a farm. He
can now walk forty miles a day without undue

THE TRUTH ABOUT HYPNOTISM 71

fatigue/ ' Similar cases are now being recorded in
the military hospitals. Soldiers make excellent
" subjects ".

It has been much debated whether a hypnotised
person could be made to commit a crime. Probably
not ; it is difficult to be quite sure, but the evidence
is on the negative side. True, a hypnotised subject
will put sugar which he has been told is arsenic into
his mother's tea, but his inner self probably knows well
enough that it is only sugar. On the other hand, it is
certain that a hypnotiser may obtain a remarkable
amount of control over specially sensitive subjects,
particularly by repeated hypnotisations.

I have seen hypnotised subjects who seemed almost
perfect automata, obeying orders as mechanically as
if they had no will of their own left. Certainly no one,
either man or woman, but particularly the latter,
should submit himself or herself to hypnotic treatment
except by a qualified person in whom full trust can be
reposed. And, even then, in the case of a woman
patient, it is well for a third person to be present.

But the stories of the novelists, about subjugated
wills, hypnotising from a distance, and all the rest of
it, are quite without adequate foundation in fact.
There is very little evidence in support of hypnosis
produced at a distance, and in the one case where it did
seem to occur there had been repeated hypnotisations
of the ordinary kind, by which a sort of telepathic
rapport was perhaps established (Myers' Human
Personality, vol. i, page 524).

Hypnotism against the will is a myth ; except per-
haps in here and there a backboneless person who
could be influenced any way, without hypnosis or
anything of the kind. The Chicago pamphleteer who
wants to teach us how to get on in business by developing

72 THE TRUTH ABOUT HYPNOTISM

a " hypnotic eye " is merely after dollars. It is
all bunkum.

There is a sense, however, in which hypnotic treat-
ment can be a help in education and in strengthening
the character. Backward and lazy children could
probably be improved, and I know cases in which sleep-
walking and other bad habits have been cured by
suggestion. From this it is but a step to dipsomania,
which can often be cured. Dr Tuckey reports seventy
cures out of two hundred cases.

F. W. H. Myers, to whose genius doctors as well as
psychologists owe their first scientific conceptions in
this domain, was extremely optimistic here. He held
that though we cannot expect to manufacture saints,
any more than we can manufacture geniuses, there is
nevertheless enough evidence to show that great things
could be done.

" If the subject is hypnotisable, and if hypnotic
suggestion be applied with sufficient persistency and
skill, no depth of previous baseness and foulness need
prevent the man or woman whom we charge with
' moral insanity ', or stamp as a ' criminal-born ',
from rising into a state where he or she can work
steadily and render services useful to the community ,J
(Human Personality, vol. i, page 199). Experiments
on hypnotic lines ought certainly to be carried out in
our prisons and reformatories. As to the formerly
alleged dangers of such experimentation — dangers of
hysteria, etc., alleged by the Charcot school which is
now seen to have been quite on a wrong tack — they
do not exist, if the operator knows his business.

Says Professor Forel : " Liebeault, Bernheim, Wetter-
strand, Van Eeden, De Jong, Moll, I myself, and the
other followers of the Nancy school, declare categoric-
ally that, although we have seen many thousands of

THE TRUTH ABOUT HYPNOTISM 73

hypnotised persons, we have never observed a single
case of mental or bodily harm caused by hypnosis,
but, on the contrary, have seen many cases of illness
relieved or cured by it ". Dr Bramwell fully endorses
this, saying emphatically that he has " never seen an
unpleasant symptom, even of the most trivial nature,
follow the skilled induction of hypnosis " {Proceedings
of the Society for Psychical Research, vol. xii, page 209).

A proof that intellectual powers outside the normal
consciousness may be tapped by appropriate methods
is afforded by the remarkable experiments of Dr
Bramwell, on the appreciation of time by somnambules.
He ordered a hypnotised subject to carry out, after
arousal, some trivial action, such as making a cross
on a piece of paper, at the end of a specified period of
time, reckoning from the moment of waking. In the
waking state, the patient knew nothing of the order ;
but a subliminal mental stratum knew, and watched
the time, making the subject carry out the order when
it fell due.

The period varied from a few minutes to several
months, and it was stated in various ways, e.g. on one
occasion Dr Bramwell ordered the action to be carried
out in " 24 hours and 2880 minutes ". The order was
given at 3.45 p.m. on December 18, and it was carried
out correctly at 3.45 p.m. on December 21. In other
experiments, the periods given were 4,417, 8,650, 8,680,
8,700, 10,070, 11,470 minutes.

All were correctly timed by the subliminal stratum,
the action being promptly carried out at the due
moment. In the waking state the patient was quite
incapable — as most of us would be — of calculating
mentally when the periods would elapse. But the
hypnotic stratum could do it, and this shows that there
are intellectual powers which lie outside the field of the

F

74 THE TRUTH ABOUT HYPNOTISM

normal consciousness. The argument could be further
supported by the feats of " calculating boys ", who can
sometimes solve the most complicated arithmetical
problems, without knowing how they do it. They let
the problem sink in, and the answer is shot up pre-
sently, like the cooked pudding in the geyser. •

But these things are still in their infancy. Psy-
chology is working at the subject, but we do not yet
know enough to enable us to venture far in the direc-
tion of practical application of hypnotic methods in
education. It seems likely, however, that further
investigation will yield knowledge which may be of
inestimable practical value in the training of minds, as
well as in the curing of mental and bodily disease.

CHRISTIAN SCIENCE

IT has been said, as a kind of jocular epigram, that
the Holy Roman Empire was neither holy nor
Roman nor an empire. With similar truth it may
be said that Christian Science is neither Christian nor
science, in any ordinary sense of those words. Still,
perhaps we ought to allow an inventor to christen his
own creation, even if the name seems inappropriate or
likely to cause misunderstanding ; and, Mrs Eddy
having invented Christian Science as an organised
religion — though, as we shall see, borrowing its main
features from an earlier prophet — we may admit her
right to give a name to her astonishing production.
In order that the personal equation may be allowed for,
the present writer begs to affirm that he writes as a
sympathetic student though not an adherent.

Mary A. Morse Baker was born on July 16th, 1821,
of pious parents, at Bow, New Hampshire. Her father
was almost illiterate, rather passionate, a keen hand
at a bargain, and a Puritan in religion. All the Bakers
were a trifle cranky and eccentric, but some of them
possessed ability of sorts, though Mary's father made
no great success in life. His daughter made up for
him afterwards.

The first fifteen years of Mary Baker's life were
passed at the old farm at Bow. The place was lonely,
the manner of life primitive, and education not a
strong point in the community. Mrs Eddy afterwards
claimed to have studied in her girlhood days Hebrew,

76 CHRISTIAN SCIENCE

Greek, Latin, natural philosophy, logic, and moral
science ! It was, however, maintained by her con-
temporaries that she was backward and indolent, and
that " Smith's Grammar, and as far as long division in
arithmetic ", might be taken as indicating the extent
of her scholarship. There is certainly some little
discrepancy here, and perhaps Mrs Eddy's memory
was a trifle at fault. She made no claim to any
acquaintance with this formidable array of subjects
in the later part of her life, and it seems probable that
her contemporaries were right. Her physical
beauty, coupled with delicate health, seem to have
resulted in " spoiling ", for even as a child she domin-
ated her surroundings to a surprising extent.

In 1843 she married George Glover, who died in
June, 1844, leaving her penniless. Her only child was
born in the September following. After ten years of
widowhood she married Daniel Paterson, a travelling
dentist. In 1866 they separated, he making some
provision for her. In 1873 she obtained a divorce
on the ground of desertion. In 1877 she married Asa
Gilbert Eddy, who died in 1882.

So much for her matrimonial experiences, which may
now be dismissed, as they had no particular influence
on her character and career. To prevent confusion,
we will call her throughout by the name which is most
familiar to us and to the world.

The chief event of Mrs Eddy's remarkable life, the
event which put her on the road to fame and fortune,
occurred in 1862. This was her meeting with the
famous " healer ", Phineas Parkhurst Quimby. This
latter was an unschooled but earnest and benevolent
man, who had made experiments in mesmerism, etc.,
and who had found — or thought he had found — that
people could be cured of their ailments by " faith ".

CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 77

He therefore began to work out a system of " mind-
cure ", which he embodied in voluminous MSS.
Patients came to him from far and near, and he treated
all, whether they could pay or not. Quimby was much
above the level of the common quack, and his character
commands our respect. He was a man of great natural
intelligence, and was admirable in all his dealings
with family, friends, and patients.

Mrs Eddy visited him at Portland in 1862, her aim
being treatment for her continued ill-health. She
claims to have been cured — in three weeks — though
it is clear from her later letters that the cure was not
complete. Still, great improvement was apparently
effected, for she had been almost bedridden, with some
kind of spinal or hysterical complaint, for eight years
previously. But Quimby' s effect on her was greater
mentally even than physically. She became interested
in his system, watched his treatment of patients,
borrowed his MSS., and mastered his teachings. In
1864 she visited him again, staying two or three months,
and prosecuting her studies. She now seemed to have
formed a definite desire to assist in teaching his system.
No doubt she dimly saw a possible career opening out
in front of her ; though we need not attribute her
desire entirely to mere ambition or greed, for it is
probable that Quimby did a great amount of genuine
good, and his pupil would naturally imbibe some of
his zeal for the relief of suffering humanity.

In 1866 Quimby died, aged sixty-four. His pupil
decided to put on the mantle of her teacher, but more
as propagandist and religious prophet than as healer.
In this latter capacity perhaps her sex was against her.
(Even now the average individual seems to have a sad
lack of confidence in the " lady doctor " !) But she
was poor, and prospects did not seem promising. For

78 CHRISTIAN SCIENCE

some time she drifted about among friends — chiefly
spiritualists — preparing MSS. and teaching Quimbyism
to anyone who would listen. (She afterwards denied
her indebtedness to Quimby, claiming direct revelation.
' No human pen nor tongue taught me the science con-
tained in this book, Science and Health, and neither
tongue nor pen can overthrow it." — Science and Health,
p. no, 1907 edition.)

Though unsuccessful as healer (in spite of her later
claim to have healed Whittier of " incipient pulmonary
consumption" in one visit), she certainly had the
knack of teaching— had the power of inspiring enthusi-
asm and of inoculating others with her ideas. In 1870
she turned up at Lynn, Mass., with a pupil named
Richard Kennedy, a lad of twenty-one. Her aim
being to found a religious organisation based on
practical results (the prayer of faith shall heal the sick,
etc.), it was necessary to work with a pupil-practitioner.
Accordingly she and Kennedy took offices at Lynn,
and " Dr Kennedy v appeared on a signboard affixed to
a tree.

Immediate success followed. Patients crowded the
waiting-rooms. Kennedy did the " healing " and Mrs
Eddy organised classes, which were recruited from the
ranks of patients and friends ; fees, a hundred dollars
for twelve lessons, afterwards raised to three hundred
dollars for seven lessons. Before long, however, she
quarrelled with Kennedy, and in 1872 they separated,
but not before she had reaped about six thousand
dollars as her share of the harvest. It was her first
taste of success, after weary years of toil and stress
and hysteria and eccentricity. Naturally, like Alex-
ander, she sighed for further conquest. Lapp Hit
vient en mangeant. Ajid, though in her fiftieth year,
she was now more energetic than ever.

CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 79

Her next move was the purchase of a house at 8,
Broad Street, Lynn, which became the first official
headquarters of Christian Science. In 1875 appeared her
famous book, Science and Health, With Key to the Scrip-
tures, which was financed by two of its author's friends.
The first edition was of a thousand copies. As it sold
but slowly, she persuaded her chief practitioner, Daniel
Spofford, to give up his practice and to devote himself
to advertising the book and pushing its sale. Since
then it has been revised many times, and the editions
are legion. Loyal disciples of the better-educated sort
have assisted in its rewriting, and it is now a very
presentable kind of affair as to its literary form. Most,
if not all, of the editions have been sold at a minimum
of $3.18 per copy, with editions de luxe at $5 or more,
and the author's other works are published at similarly
high prices. All Christian Scientists were commanded
to buy the works of the Reverend Mother, and all suc-
cessive editions of those works. It is not surprising
that Mrs Eddy should leave a fortune of a million and a
half dollars. It may be mentioned here that she moved
from Lynn to Boston in 1882, thence to Concord (New
Hampshire) in 1889, and finally to a large mansion in a
Boston suburb which she bought for $100,000, spending
a similar sum in remodelling and enlarging. The
modern prophet does not dwell in the wilderness,
subsisting on locusts and wild honey. He — or she —
has moved with the times, and has a proper respect
for the almighty dollar and the comforts of civilisation.

In 1881 was founded the Massachusetts Metaphysical
College. This imposingly-named institution never had
any special buildings, and its instructions were mostly
given in Mrs Eddy's parlour, Mrs Eddy herself con-
stituting all the faculty. Four thousand students
passed through the " College " in seven years, at the

8o CHRISTIAN SCIENCE

end of which period it ceased to exist. The fees were
usually $300 for seven lessons, as before. Few gold-
mines pay as well as did the " Metaphysical College ".
The fact does not at first sight increase our respect for
the alleged cuteness of the inhabitants of the States.
But, on further investigation, the murder is out.
Most of these students probably earned back by
" healing " much more than they paid Mrs Eddy.
Our respect for Uncle Sam's business shrewdness
returns in full force.

The experiment of conducting religious services had
been made by Mrs Eddy at Lynn in 1875, but the first
Christian Science Church was not chartered until 1879.
The Scientists met, however, in various public halls of
Boston, until 1894, when a church was built. This
was soon outgrown, and 10,000 of the faithful pledged
themselves to raise two million dollars for its enlarge-
ment. The new building was finished in 1906. Its
auditorium holds five thousand people. The walls
are decorated with texts signed " Jesus, the Christ,"
and " Mary Baker G. Eddy " — these names standing
side by side.

The following examples, culled almost at random,
will further show how great is her conviction that she
has the Truth, how vigorously she bulls her own stocks
(somehow, financial metaphors seem inevitable when
writing of Mrs Eddy) :

" God has been graciously fitting me during many
years for the reception of this final revelation of the
absolute divine Principle of scientific mental healing ".
(Science and Health, p. 107.)

" I won my way to absolute conclusion through
divine revelation, reason and demonstration ". (Ibid.,
p. 109.)

" To those natural Christian Scientists, the ancient

CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 81

worthies, and to Christ Jesus, God certainly revealed
the Spirit of Christian Science, if not the absolute
letter '\ {Ibid., p. 483.)

" The theology of Christian Science is truth ; opposed
to which is the error of sickness, sin, and death, that
truth destroys ". (Miscellaneous Writings, p. 62.)

" Christian Science is the unfolding of true Meta-
physics, that is, of Mind, or God, and His attributes.
Science rests on principle and demonstration. The
Principle of Christian Science is divine ". (Ibid., p. 69.)

The following may be quoted as an example of mixed
good and evil, with a certain flavour of unconscious
humour :

" Hate no one ; for hatred is a plague-spot that
spreads its virus and kills at last. If indulged, it
masters us ; brings suffering to its possessor throughout
time, and beyond the grave. If you have been badly
wronged, forgive and forget : God will recompense
this wrong, and punish, more severely than you could,
him who has striven to injure you ". (Miscellaneous
Writings, p. 12.)

The advice is good, but it is not new. And Mrs
Eddy seemed to experience a special joy in the thought
that by leaving our enemies alone they will receive
from God a more effective trouncing than we with our
poor appliances could administer. The ideal Christian
would not want his enemies handing over to the
inquisitor — he would beg for them to be let off. " Father,
forgive them, for they know not what they do ! "
That is the Christian attitude. It is perhaps too high
for ordinary mortals to attain to, but Mrs Eddy made
such high claims that we are entitled to judge her by
correspondingly high standards.

The form of service in the various Christian Science
churches at first included a sermon. But Mrs Eddy

82 CHRISTIAN SCIENCE

f

soon saw that this might introduce discord : for the
preachers might differ in their interpretations of
Science and Health. And Mrs Eddy above all things
aimed at unity in order to keep the control in her own
hands. Therefore, in 1895, she forbade preaching
altogether. The Bible and Science and Health, With
Key to the Scriptures, were to be read from, but no ex-
planatory comments were to be made. The services
comprise Sunday morning and evening readings from
these two books, with music ; the Wednesday evening
experience meeting ; and the communion service, once
or twice a year only. There is no baptismal, marriage,
or burial service, and weddings and funerals are never
conducted in Christian Science churches.

As to church government, there was a nominal
board of directors, but Mrs Eddy had supreme power.
She could appoint or dismiss at will. The Church
was hers, body and soul. Probably no other religious
leader ever had such an unqualified sway. The Holy
Father at Rome is a mere figurehead in comparison
with the late Reverend Mother.

In June, 1907, there were in all 710 branch churches.
Of these, twenty-five were in Canada, fourteen in
Britain, two in Ireland, four in Australia, one in South
Africa, eight in Mexico, two in Germany, one in Hol-
land, one in France, and the remainder in the States.
There were also 295 societies not yet incorporated
into churches. The total membership of the 710
churches was probably about 50,000. (In Pulpit and Press,
p. 82, Mrs Eddy puts the number at 100,000 to 200,000 ;
and this was in 1895 . Some claim that the total number
of adherents is as high as a million. But these are
probably exaggerated estimates.) About one-tenth
of these make their living by their faith. Here we come
to the secret of Christian Science success.

CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 83

There are about 400 authorised Christian Science
" healers ", and many who practise without diploma
but not without pay. These people treat sick folks,
receiving fees. Their method is to assure the
patient that he is under a delusion in thinking himself
ill, that matter is an illusion, that God is All, etc. It
sounds very absurd. But the curious thing is that
many people have been cured by this treatment, and —
naturally — these people become ardent Christian Scien-
tists. It is by the practical application that Christian
Science as a religion lives and thrives. As to the kind
of diseases cured, the most extravagant claims are
made. In Miscellaneous Writings, p. 41, Mrs Eddy
definitely states that " all classes of disease " can be
healed by her method. After careful sifting of much
evidence, however, Dr Myers and his brother (F. W. H.
Myers) found that no proof was forthcoming for the
cure of definite organic disease by Christian Science
methods. (Proceedings of the Society for Psychical
Research, vol. ix, p. 160 ; also Journal, vol. viii,
p. 247.) Undoubtedly they have been, and are con-
tinually, efficient in relieving, and even curing, many
functional disorders which have resisted ordinary
medical treatment — and it must be remembered that
many functional derangements are as serious, sub-
jectively, as grave organic disease — and consequently
it is undeniable that Christian Science often does good.
But it is probable that the same amount of good, and
perhaps more, could be done by the hypnotic or sug-
gestive treatment of a qualified medical man, or perhaps
by other forms of " faith-healing ". The Christian
Scientist is using suggestion ; but he couples it up with
religion, and thus, perhaps — with some people — suc-
ceeds in driving the suggestion home with greater
force. It is noteworthy that similar attempts are

84 CHRISTIAN SCIENCE

now being made in other directions — witness the
Emmanuel movement in New York, the Faithists and
various " psycho-therapeutic " societies in England,
and the tendency in some quarters (Bishop of London)
to return to anointing and laying on of hands by
clergymen.

Psychologically, Mrs Eddy is at least classified,
if not entirely explained, by one word — monoideism.
She was a person of one idea. These people, for whom
we usually have the simpler term of " crank ", are
common enough. I have no personal acquaintance
with the circle-squaring and perpetual-motion cranks
mentioned by De Morgan (The Budget of Paradoxes),
but I know a " fiat-earth " crank, and am well ac-
quainted with a " British-Israelite " crank, who seems
to derive unspeakable joy — tempered only by his
failure to convert me — from the thought that we
Britishers are veritably the descendants of one or more
of the Lost Tribes. All these people are conscious of a
mission. They have had a revelation, and are anxious
to impart it. Their efforts may not be due to the
" last infirmity of noble mind ", still less to a lower
motive. They may just be built that way. The
majority of them, like my Lost-Tribes friend, get no
hearing because of the inflexible pragmatism of a
stiffnecked and utilitarian generation. " What differ-
ence does it make whether we are the Tribes or not ? ■
asks the man in the street. And he passes on with a
shrug or a grin, according to temperament. This
terrible pragmatic test makes short work of many
amiable cranks. And it is just here that Christian
Science scores its point ; for it cures physical disease,
thereby becoming intensely practical. Health is the
chief " good " of life. Anything that will restore it to
an ailing body commands immediate and universal

CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 85

respect. Christian Science therefore appeals, on its
practical side, to the deepest thing in us — to the primal
instinct of self-preservation. Hence its success.

It is possible to blame Mrs Eddy unjustly for her love
of power as such. She was not unique in this respect.
The difference is that Mrs Eddy succeeded while the
others have not, and are consequently not heard
of. My LostrTribes friend would be as autocratic
as anybody if he had the chance ; but his motive would
not be greed of power, but rather the overmastering
desire to push his cause, to proselytise, to promulgate
his one idea, almost by force, if such a thing were
possible. Most of us know a few fanatics of this kind.
The objects of their devotion are varied — one is mad
north-north-west, another south-south-east — but all
suffer from a lack of balance, a lack of proper distribu-
tion of interest. Of course, we may cheerfully admit
that we are all more or less specialists in our several
departments, and that the line between sanity and
insanity is rather arbitrary. We all seem more or less
mad to those who do not agree with us.

The good and true part of Christian Science is its
demonstration of the influence of mind on body, and
of the usefulness of inducing mental states of an
optimistic character. It may, of course, be said that
we need no Mrs Eddy to tell us this. True, we don't.
The great seers and poets have always taught optimism,
and the influence of mind on body was medically
recognised — more or less — long before even Quimby's
time. But we must remember that different minds
need different treatment — need their nutriment and
stimulant in different forms, to suit the various mental
digestions and receptive powers. Consequently, though
we may prefer Browning for optimism and the doctors
for hypnotic therapeutics, we need not complain if

86 CHRISTIAN SCIENCE

others prefer Mrs Eddy and her disciples. If they get
good from their way of putting things, and if that
good manifests itself in their character and life — in
their total reaction on the world — by all means let them
continue to walk in their chosen way. It would be
wrong to try to turn them. The system " works " ;
therefore it is true for them. The tree is known by its
fruits. And the fruits of Christian Science are un-
doubtedly often good. In this complex world nothing
is unmixedly good, and harm is no doubt done occasion-
ally. But, on the whole, it seems probable that Mrs
Eddy, with all her hysteria and morbidities and ran-
cours and queerness, has been a power for good in the
world. Her writings meet a want which some people
feel, or, rather, provide them with a useful impulse in
the direction of physical and spiritual regeneration.
If you can make a sick person stop brooding over his
ailments and worrying over things in general, you have
achieved something which enormously increases his
chance of recovery ; and if you can make him turn all
his thoughts and energies in the direction of recovery,
and all his emotional powers in the direction of love and
goodwill to his fellow-men and towards God, there is
no limit to the powers which may be put in operation.
In spite of all our achievements in science — and they
have been great — we are only, as Newton said, picking
up pebbles on the sea-shore. Nature is boundless ; we
can fix no limits to her powers. And we know so little,
really, about disease, that I am not at all prepared to
deny the Christian Science claims, even with regard to
organic disease. The distinction between organic
and functional is in our own inabilities, not in the
nature of the case ; we call a disease " organic " when
we find definite tissue-change, and " functional " when
we do not ; but in the latter case there must be some

CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 87

organic basis, though too small perhaps to be discover-
able— say a lesion in a tiny nerve. Consequently
I regard the question of Christian Science cures as
entirely one of evidence. I keep an open mind. If I
come across enough evidence, I will believe that it can
cure tuberculosis of the lungs and other diseases, as
claimed, whether I can understand how it does it or
not. At present, like Dr Myers, I am not convinced ;
but I have seen enough of Christian Science results
among my own friends to prevent me from denying
anything. I merely suspend judgment. But I do
believe that the power of the mind over the body is so
great that almost anything is possible ; and I think
that the medical advance of the next half-century will
be chiefly in this hitherto neglected direction. I
happen to know that this, or something very near this,
was the strongly-held opinion of the late Professor
William James of Harvard, who, in addition to being
the most brilliant psychologist of his generation, was
also a qualified doctor of medicine.

JOAN OF ARC

GREAT results often flow from small causes.
Pascal said that if Cleopatra's nose had
been shorter the history of the world would
have been different. Similarly it may be truly said that
if a peasant girl of Domremy had not had hallucina-
tions, France would now have been a British province.
And it is curious to reflect that the Church which burnt
her as a heretic and sorcerer has her, and her only, to
thank for such hold as it still maintains on France,
for the latter would have become Protestant if England
had won. The Roman church now recognises this,
and has beatified the Maid. The next step will be
her canonisation as a saint. Thus does the whirligig
of Time bring its revenges.

Jeanne d'Arc was born in the village of Domremy
near Vaucouleurs, on the border of Champagne and
Lorraine, on January 6th, 1412. She was taught to
spin and to sew, but not to read or write, these accom-
plishments being beyond what was necessary for people
in her station of life. Her parents were devout, and
she was brought up piously. Her nature was gentle,
modest, and religious, but with no physical weakness
or morbid abnormality — on the contrary, she was
exceptionally strong, as her later history proves.

At or about the age of thirteen, Jeanne began to
experience what psychology now calls " auditory
hallucinations ". That is, she heard voices — usually
accompanied by a bright light — when no visible person

JOAN OF ARC 89

was present. This, of course, is a common symptom
of impending mental disorder ; but no insanity de-
veloped in Jeanne d' Arc. Startled she naturally was at
first, but continuation led to familiarity and trust.
The voices gave good counsel of a commonplace kind,
as, for instance, that she " must be a good girl and go
regularly to church/' Soon, however, she began to
have visions : saw St Michael, St Catherine, and St
Margaret ; was given instructions as to her mission ;
eventually made her way to the Dauphin ; put herself
at the head of 6,000 men, and advanced to the relief
of Orleans, which was besieged by the conquering
English. After a fortnight of hard fighting the siege
was raised, and the enemy driven off. The tide of war
had turned, and in three months the Dauphin was
crowned King at Rheims, as Charles the Seventh.

At this point Jeanne felt that her mission was ac-
complished. But her wish to return to her family was
over-ruled by king and archbishop, and she took part
in the further fighting against the allied English and
Burgundian forces, showing great bravery and tactical
skill. But in November, 1430, in a desperate sally from
Compiegne — which was besieged by the Duke of Bur-
gundy— she fell into the enemy's hands, was sold to
the English, and thrown into a dungeon at their head-
quarters in Rouen.

After a year's imprisonment she was brought to
trial — a mock trial before the Bishop of Beauvais,
in an ecclesiastical court. Learned doctors of the
church did their best to entangle the simple girl in their
dialectical toils ; but she showed a remarkable power
of keeping to her simple affirmations and of avoiding
heretical statements. " God has always been my Lord
in all that I have done ". But the trial was only
pretence, for her fate was already decided. She was

G

90 JOAN OF ARC

burnt to death, amid the jeers and execration of a
rabble of brutal soldiery, in Rouen market-place on
May 30th, 1431.

The life of the Maid supplies a problem which ortho-
dox sciencexannot solve. She was a simple peasant
girl, with no ambitions hankering after a career. She
rebelled pathetically against her mission. "I had
far rather rest and spin by my mother's side, for this
is no work of my choosing, but I must go and do it,
for my Lord wills it." She cannot be dismissed on the
u simple idiot " theory of Voltaire, for her genius in
war and her aptitude in repartee undoubtedly prove
exceptional mental powers, unschooled though she was
in what we call education. We cannot call her a mere
hysteric, for her health and strength were superb.
A man of science once said to an Abbe : " Come to the
Salp&tri&re Hospital, and I will show you twenty
Jeannes d'Arc." To which the Abbe responded :
" Has one of them given us back Alsace and Lorraine ? "

There is the crux, as Andrew Lang quietly remarked.

The retort was certainly neat. Still, though the
Salp6triere hysterics have not won back Alsace and
Lorraine, it is nevertheless true that a great movement
may be started, or kept going when started, by fraud,
hallucination, and credulity. The Mormons, for ex-
ample, are a strong body, but the origins of their faith
will not bear much criticism. The Book of Mormon,
handed down from heaven by an angel, is more than we
can swallow. No one saw its " metal leaves '; —
from which Joseph Smith translated— except Joseph
himself. We have our own opinion about Joseph's
truthfulness. Somewhat similarly with spiritualism.
The great movement is there, based partly on fact as
I believe, but supported by some fraud and much
ignorance and credulity. May it not have been some-

JOAN OF ARC 91

what thus with Jeanne ? She delivered France, and
her importance in history is great ; but may not her
mission and her doings have been the outcome of
merely subjective hallucinations, induced by the
brooding of her specially religious and patriotic mind
on the woes of her country ? The army, being ignorant
and superstitious, would readily believe in the super-
natural character of her mission, and great energy and
valour would follow as a matter of course — for a man
fights well when he believes that Providence is on his
side.

That is the usual kind of theory in explanation of
the facts. But it is not fully satisfactory. How came
it — one may ask — that this untutored peasant girl
could persuade not only the rude soldiery, but also
the Dauphin and the court, of her Divine appointment ?
How came she to be given the command of an army ?
Surely a post of such responsibility and power would
not be given to a peasant girl of eighteen, on the mere
strength of her own claim to inspiration. It seems, at
least, very improbable.

Now it seems (though the materialistic school of
historians conveniently ignore or belittle it) that there
is strong evidence in support of the idea that Jeanne
gave the Dauphin some proof of the possession of
supernormal faculties. In fact, the evidence is so
strong that Mr Lang called it M unimpeachable "—
and Mr Lang did not usually err on the side of credulity
in these matters. Among other curious things, Jeanne
seems to have repeated to Charles the words of a prayer
which he had made mentally, and she also made some
kind of clairvoyant discovery of a sword hidden behind
the altar of Fierbois church. Schiller's magnificent
dramatic poem " Die Jungfrau von Orleans" though
unhistorical in some details, is substantially accurate

92 JOAN OF ARC

on these points concerning clairvoyance and mind-
reading.

As to the voices and visions, a Protestant will have
a certain prejudice with regard to the St Michael,
St Catherine, and St Margaret stories, though he may
very possibly be wrong in his disbelief. But, waiving
that, it may be true that some genuine inspiration was
truly given to the Maid from the deeper strata of her
own soul, and that these monitions externalised
themselves in the forms in which her thought habitually
ran. If she had been a Greek of two thousand years
earlier, her visions would probably have taken the form
of Apollo and Pallas Athene ; yet they might equally
well have contained truth and good counsel, as did the
utterances of the Oracles.

And, speaking of the Greeks, we may remember
that the wisest of that race had similar experiences.
Socrates — the pre-eminent type of sanity and mental
burliness — was counselled by his " daimon ".; by a
warning Voice which, truly, did not give positive
advice like Jeanne's, but which intervened to stop him
when about to make some wrong decision. Again —
to jump suddenly down to modern times — Charles
Dickens says in his letters that the characters of his
novels took on a kind of independent existence, and
that Mrs Gamp, his greatest creation, spoke to him
(generally in church) as with an actual voice. In fact,
all cases of creative genius, whether in literature, art,
or invention, are examples of an uprush from unknown
mental depths : the process is not the same as the
intellectual process of reasoning. In these cases, as
for instance with Socrates, Jeanne dArc, Dickens, the
deeper strata of the mind may be supposed to send up
thoughts so vigorously that they become externalised
as hallucinations ; not necessarily morbid or injurious,

JOAN OF ARC 93

though of course many hallucinations are undoubtedly
both. The inspiration rises from below the conscious
threshold. It is as if " given " ; and the normal
conscious mind looks on in passive astonishment.
Alles ist als wie geschenkt, says Goethe — and he knew,
if anybody did. A similar thing happens, on a more
ordinary plane, when a problem that has baffled the
working mind is solved in sleep. In short, the normal
consciousness is not all there is of us ; there are levels
and powers below the threshold. And it seems likely
that the new psychology is on the track of a better
explanation of Socrates and Jeanne d'Arc, as well as
of the nature of genius in general, than has yet been
excogitated by the philosophers. Certainly these
things supply interesting material for study, and many
curious discoveries are now being made in this field
of research.

IS THE EARTH ALIVE?

SOME of the ancients thought the earth was an
animal. It has its hard and soft parts, its
bone and flesh — rock and soil — as the Norse
cosmology pictured it ; also its blood, of seas, rivers,
and the like, To a coast-dwelling people, the rhythmic
inflow and outflow of the tides would suggest a huge
slow blood-pulsation, or a breathing. And heat
increases with depth, in mine or cave ; fire spouts from
Etna and Vesuvius ; evidently the earth is hotter
inside than at the surface, as animals are hotter inside
than on their skins. Some such animal-notion was
held by Plato, and by some of the later Stoics ; though
it does not seem to have been worked out in detail.
And the Greek, Indian, or Egyptian theology which
made the earth a goddess and the bride of Heaven or
the sun, is still more indefinite, or is crudely anthropo-
morphic and primitive.

Modern approximations have been chiefly in poetry,
and are pan-psychic rather than animistic ; as in Pope's
Essay on Man :

All are but parts of one stupendous whole,
Whose body Nature is, and God the soul,

and in Wordsworth's T intern Abbey where the presence
which disturbs him with the joy of elevated thoughts
is felt to be the Spirit which has its dwelling in the light
of setting suns and the round ocean and the living air :

IS THE EARTH ALIVE? 95

A motion and a spirit that impels

All thinking things, all objects of all thought,

And rolls through all things. Therefore am I still

A lover of the meadows and the woods,

And mountains ; and all that we behold

From this green earth ; of all the mighty world

Of eye, and ear.

Emerson expresses the same thought in Pan and in
much of his prose — Nature, The Over Soul, Self-Reli-
ance. William James, in early days before his plural-
istic development, thought that an anima mundi think-
ing in all of us was a more likely hypothesis than that
of " a lot of individual souls " ; and Leibnitz, among
other metaphysical great ones, Spinozistically speaks
of " un seul esprit qui est universel et qui anime tout
Tunivers ". Finally, to quote a modern of the moderns,
we find Mr H. G. Wells finely saying that " between
you and me as we set our minds together, and between
us and the rest of mankind, there is something, some-
thing real, something that rises through us and is neither
you nor me, that comprehends us, that is thinking here
and using me and you to play against each other in
that thinking just as my finger and thumb play against
each other as I hold this pen with which I write".
(First and Last Things, p. 67.)

But these various poets and thinkers, while suggest-
ing a soul-side of the material universe, have not ven-
tured to attribute spirits to specific lumps of matter
such as the planets. Science has banished those
celestial genii. Kepler and Newton substituted for
them the " bald and barren doctrine of gravitation ",
to the disgust of the theologically orthodox. It is
possible, however, that science did not banish these
planetary spirits, but only prevented us from seeing
them, by turning our eyes in another direction, towards
the laws according to which the material universe
works ; as if we should become so absorbed in the

96 IS THE EARTH ALIVE ?

chemistry and physics of blood oxidation, digestion,
cerebral change, and the like, as to forget that the
human body has a consciousness associated with it.
It may be that we are too materialistic in our astronomy.
Perhaps Lorenzo was right, even about the music
of the spheres ; and that our deafness, not their silence,
is the reason why we do not hear it.

The nineteenth century produced a thinker who
revived the animistic idea in an improved form. He
elaborated it into a system of philosophy, welding into
it the discoveries of science, and leaving room for any
further advance in that direction. At the same time
he showed that his system was essentially religious, and
indeed quite consistent with Christianity in its best
interpretations. But his writings fell almost dead
from the press, for he was before his time. The
scientific men were materialists, and sneered at a
system which recognised a spiritual world ; while
the orthodox Christians were scared by its evolutionary
method and its acceptance of Darwinism when the
latter arrived — for the philosophy preceded it — and
also by the novelty of some of its ideas.

Gustav Theodor Fechner was born on April 19, 1801,
at Gross-Sarchen in what is now Silesia, then under
the Elector of Saxony. He studied at Leipzig, and was
appointed professor of Physics at the University there,
in 1834. He conducted several scientific journals,
wrote text-books, translated Biot's Physics (4 vols.)
Thenard's Chemistry (6 vols.) and a work on cerebral
pathology ; also edited an eight- volume Encyclopedia
of which he wrote about a third himself, lectured, and
made researches in electro-magnetism which injured
his eyesight. His chief scientific work, Elements of
Psycho-Physics, was published in 1859, additions being
made in 1877 and 1882. " Fechner's Law ", the

IS THE EARTH ALIVE? 97

fundamental law of psychophysics (that sensation
varies in the ratio of the logarithm of impression) is
now an internationally current term. Men like Paulsen
and Wundt do not hesitate to call Fechner master.
His chief philosophical work is Zend-Avesta (3 vols.)
published in 185 1, and rearranged and condensed in
Die Tagesansicht gegenbiier der Nachtansicht (1879) ;
but he published also many subsidiary volumes. Only
one of his works has appeared in English — the small
volume on Life After Death— and even this had to be
brought out by an American publisher ! Yet Fechner
is, as Professor William James said, " a philosopher
in the great sense . . . little known as yet to English
readers, but destined, I am persuaded, to wield more
and more influence as time goes on M. {A Pluralistic
Universe, pp. 135, 149.) The prophecy is already
beginning to come true.

Fechner always begins with the known and indisput-
able, arguing thence to the unknown. His method is
thus analogical and scientific. It is the only method
that a scientific generation will tolerate. Its results
may be disputed, but so can the results of science.
Even mathematics gives us no certainties, for something
must always be taken for granted. In philosophising
by analogy, we do at least keep in close touch with
experience ; we do not evaporate the world into an
" unearthly ballet of bloodless categories ". And if
the analogies point mostly one way, with only weak
ones pointing the other, the result may be at least
acceptable as a working hypothesis, even if not " de-
monstrable ".

Man is a living, thinking, feeling being. He is on
the surface of a nearly spherical body, which he calls
the earth, out of which his material part has arisen.
The elements of his body are the same as those in the

98 IS THE EARTH ALIVE?

earth. His carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, and hydrogen
are the carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, and hydrogen of the
coal measures, soils, atmosphere, oceans, of the earth.
The calcium carbonate of his bones is the calcium
carbonate of her rocks as seen in cliffs at Flamborough
and Dover. He is bone of her bone, flesh of her flesh.
Sometimes he calls her Mother Earth, and involuntarily
speaks the truth in jest. In Siberia the Tartar word
for the earth is " Mamma " — a curious fact. Indeed,
the bond between the earth and her children is much
closer than in the case of a human mother and her
child ; for we remain, all our lives, actually part of the
planet's mass. If our bodies were suddenly annihil-
ated, the earth's gravitative attraction would be
altered, and the whole solar system would have to
readjust itself to the slight diminution. We belong
to the earth. We are a film of cells on her skin. In
Piccadilly and the Bowery (and Throgmorton and
Wall Streets?) we are — alas! -an eczematous patch.
But here it may be objected that man is more than a
mere body. Quite true. Man has experiences of an
order different from the material one. You cannot
express joy and sorrow by chemical equations or
number of foot-pounds. Even if there is a material
equivalent or necessary concomitant, of electrical or
chemical change in cerebal tissue or what not, the fact
of the non-material experience remains a reality. To
indicate this side of human life, we call it the spiritual
side. We say that man is matter and spirit, body and
soul. This is quite justifiable and right, whether we
can define the terms or not. Definition means explain-
ing a word by means of others that are better known.
And as we cannot get any closer to reality than our own
experience, which is reality to us, and as the two
words conveniently classify two great departments of

IS THE EARTH ALIVE? 99

experience, we justifiably say that we are soul and body.
Very well ; the body, then, when we die, returns to
the earth, from which indeed it has not been severed,
except as being a point at which a special kind of
activity was manifested. What then of the soul ?
Shall it not return to the earth-soul, as the body
returns to the earth-body ?

Man has arisen out of the earth. And can
the dead give birth to the living ? Such an idea is
self-contradictory. If the Earth has produced us, it
cannot be really a mere dead lump, as nineteenth-
century materialistic science regarded it. It must
be alive. The fifteen hundred millions or so of human
beings who live on its surface like microscopic insects on
the body of an elephant, or like epidermis-cells on our
own bodies, constitute in their total weight and size
only an almost infinitesimal proportion of the earth's
mass. The earth is 8,000 miles in diameter ; if human
beings were so numerous that they could only stand up,
wedged together all over its surface, tropics and poles,
land and water— the latter covers seven-tenths of it —
they would only be like a skin 2 uu;o o o^1 Part °* an i*10*1
thick, on a globe a yard in diameter. The total mass of
all the living creatures on the earth's surface, including
all animals and all vegetation, is almost inconceivably
small, as compared with the mass of the earth. Is it
not a trifle ludicrous to find some of these little crea-
tures looking down so condescendingly on the remainder
of the planet ? Emerson was among the few who have
seen the joke, for in Hamatreya he satirises those who
boast of possessing pieces of the earth :

Where are these men ? Asleep beneath their grounds :
And strangers, fond as they, their furrows plough.
Earth laughs in flowers, to see her boastful boys
Earth -proud, proud of the earth which is not theirs ;
Who steer the plough, but cannot steer their feet
Clear of the grave.

ioo IS THE EARTH ALIVE?

And the earth sings :

They called me theirs,

Who so controlled me ;

Yet every one

Wished to stay, and is gone,

How am I theirs,

If they cannot hold me,

But I hold them ?

A very natural objection to the idea of the earth
being full of life and mind — as my body is full of
my life and my mind — is that the inorganic part of the
planet presents no evidence of such. It does not act
as if it were alive and conscious. But this begs the
whole question. If you decide beforehand that all
evidence for the existence of mind must be the sort of
phenomena exhibited by the things we call living,
the business is settled, and it is clear that the inorganic
kingdom is without consciousness. There is then
no sign of mind anywhere except in that infinitesimally
thin and indeed discontinous skin which is made up of
living individuals on the earth's surface. But is it
not somewhat presumptuous to dogmatise thus ?
Why should mind always manifest itself in the same
way ? Non-living matter does not show vital activities,
but it does show other activities, quite systematic and
non-chaotic and comprehensible ones. How could
"dead" matter have any activity at all? Even
Haeckel postulates a sort of mind in the atom, and we
have heard of " mind-stuff " before, from an equally
determined materialist, Indeed, how can we ration-
alise the behaviour of phosphorus in oxygen but by
saying that the two elements like each other so well
that they rush to combine whenever possible ? If
carbon has great " affinity," showing a tendency to
combine with many atoms of other elements in various
complicated ways — at least as regards its favourite

IS THE EARTH ALIVE? 101

types — it is reasonable to regard it as a much-loving
element — the polygamous Solomon of the elements.
If fluorine will have nothing to do with other substances
— except under protest, when persuaded by Miss
Hydrogen, whose gaiety and levity sometimes over-
come its sulkiness, bringing it also into the society of
calcium and one or two other metals — we must say
that fluorine is unsociable, morbidly self-centred, or
perhaps mystically disposed, like Thoreau, happy by
his pond, alone. Chemical affinity is the loves of the
elements.

Rising to the next grade of complexity above atoms,
we find that molecular movements, visible in the ap-
parently representative Brownian movements of par-
ticles, recall the fidget of a bunch of midges, and thereby
suggest a sort of life. They disobey the second law
of thermodynamics, rising in a lighter liquid, as midges
rise in the tenuous air. Of course no one can deny
that in the things we call living there are phenomena
not seen elsewhere, and some of these are quite probably
not understandable at all, in terms of measurement
or imagery, as we can understand the Brownian move-
ments by irregular bombardment of molecules. We
cannot understand the relation between a supposed
brain-change and the corresponding mental fact.
The two orders of being seem disjunctive. Perhaps
these things are too close to us to be understood ;
perhaps we cannot understand life and consciousness
because we are ourselves alive and conscious — as we
cannot lift ourselves by pulling at our boot tops, and
cannot see our own faces because the eyes that see are
in the face that is to be seen. Still the distinction
between life at its lowest and non-life at its highest
(crystals ?) is so small that we may yet effect a smooth
transition — may somehow see a continuity which now

102 IS THE EARTH ALIVE?

eludes us. And it seems likely that this will be effected
by an extension of the mind-idea down into the inorganic,
rather than by any explanation of life by physical and
chemical concepts.

Again, on the larger scale, may not cohesion, as well
as chemical affinity, be a sort of affection ; in this
case a kind of wide social friendship — the " adhesive
love " of Whitman, which is to supersede " amative
love " — as against the fierce and narrow loves of the
elements ? A. C. Benson in Joyous Gard (p. 128)
quotes a geologist who says :

It is not by any means certain that stones do not have a certain
obscure life of their own ; I have sometimes thought that their
marvellous cohesion may be a sign of life, and that if life were with-
drawn, a mountain might in a moment become a heap of sliding
sand.

Yes, and even in sand-grains there is cohesion of
particles, and in the smallest particles huge numbers
of molecules, and again — still smaller — atoms and
electrons. Something elusive yet tremendously potent
is still there, in the sand. It would be rash to call it
dead and mindless. There seems more sense in admit-
ting that there is something akin to what we know as
life and mind in ourselves, permeating the material
universe.

And if — to come back to our own planet — if the
earth is a living organism, there will naturally be dis-
tribution of function, as there is in our own bodies.
It would be absurd for the eye to deny life and per-
ception to ear or skin just because their mode of activity
is different. It is wiser to concede life and mind where-
ever there is action. In the present state of affairs,
not only do we get into difficulties by our rash assump-
tion that there is no mind without protoplasm (ohne
Phosphor kein Gedanke, as the old materialist too
boldly said), but we find it impossible to draw the line

IS THE EARTH ALIVE? 103

between living and non-living. Drops of oil exhibit
amoeboid movements, and at the lower end of life
the slime-mass becomes so undifferentiated as to be
very much in a borderland between the two states.
Probably non-living substances gradate into living
ones by imperceptible differentia, as man would be
found to gradate back into an anthropoid ape or some-
thing of the kind if we could see all the stages. Nature
does not make jumps. Where she seems to do so, it is
only because we cannot see how she gets from one
place to another distant one. But when we scrutinise
the interspace, we see that there is a path. Nature
does not jump. She glides.

It is on this line of thought that the disagreement
between the schools represented by Sir Edward Schafer
and Dr Hans Driesch respectively may, perhaps, be
happily resolved. No doubt each may have to make
concessions. The mechanist must not claim that
mind is only an affair of nitrogenous colloids, for this
would be a large assumption built on a very small
foundation ; no biologist, however much he knows
about nitrogenous colloids, can in any conceivable
sense explain his joy in a sunset or a symphony by
reference to those substances. Physical causes have
physical effects ; to say that they cause anything
non-physical {i.e. mental) is really talking nonsense.
And, on the other hand, the vitalist must not deny
consciousness to non-protoplasmic Nature. Negations
are dangerous. It is extremely risky to say that a
Matterhorn has less spiritual significance — in itself
and for the whole, and not only for us — than a cretin
who wanders useless and unbeautiful about its lower
slopes. The activities of the two are different, that
is all we are justified in saying. True, the Matter-
horn's are more calculable and predictable, but that

104 IS THE EARTH ALIVE?

does not prove unconsciousness. Human action also
is predictable to some extent. And the more wise
and unified a man is — the nearer he approximates to
ideal perfection — the more accurately we can predict
his response to a given stimulus. We might almost
argue, on these lines, that inorganic matter has a
certain superiority ; for it is not capricious. It knows
what it wants to do, and does it ; or at least—if this
is going too far — it does things, and does them as if
it knew very well what it wanted to do. To the same
conditions and stimuli it always responds in the same
way, like reflex action in living beings, and like associa-
tion in ordinary consciousness. Water always boils
punctually at ioo°C, and freezes at o°C, if the pressure
is 760mm. of mercury. " Canal " always makes me
think of Panama and Mars — though to other people
it might suggest Suez, their different experience having
given them other association-couplings. But any
one knowing me well, or knowing any one well, could
say almost certainly what associations " canal " would
have — what thought it will evoke. And the same
thing is true, to a less extent, of our actions. If a man
hits Jack Johnson, the latter will probably hit back.
Still more certain is it that no one will hit him unless
drunk or insane or in some sort of very exceptional
circumstances. If, on the other hand, somebody hits
me, the outcome is less certain. It will depend to a
greater extent on the result of reflection and judgment
—perhaps partly on my estimate of the other fellow's
weight, age, training and science ! Yet anyone know-
ing me well, and perceiving the main conditions, could
predict with fair approach to accuracy what I should
do. Yet I am undoubtedly a conscious being. Some
actions of conscious beings, then, are predictable, if
we know the conditions. Indeed, in the mass, human

IS THE EARTH ALIVE? 105

action is calculable with precision — witness the various
kinds of insurance. Why then deny consciousness
to the Matterhorn, because all its actions are calculable
and predictable ? The difference is one of degree, not
kind. And indeed are all its actions predictable ?
The fact is, they are only hypothetically so. We say
that they would be if we knew enough. But we might
say the same of the actions of a man. The truth is,
that if we say it of either we are arguing dangerously,
from our ignorance and not from our knowledge. It
is indeed as risky to say that we could predict the
Matterhorn s actions in toto, as to say that we cannot
predict the man's ; for we are continually finding that
matter does things which we did not formerly suspect
— e.g. radio-activity. Clearly, we cannot predict all
the activities of the Matterhorn : many may depend
on undiscovered properties. So it seems that even if
some human actions, such as Newton's discovery of
the law of gravitation and Milton's Paradise Lost and
Spencer's Synthetic Philosophy and Raphael's Sistine
Madonna, are strictly unpredictable, it still does not
sufficiently differentiate us from the Matterhorn, which
on its part also has its unpredictabilities.

As to what parts of matter have separate spirits —
where the Snowdon-spirit ends and the Moel Siabod
spirit begins, and so on — we need not trouble much
about that. This individualising of parts is a reason-
able supposition, but it is not necessary to press it.
Mr Maurice Hewlett has seen the genius loci of a sunny
woodland landscape translated into human idiom as an
opulent Titianesque beauty {Lore of Proserpine), and
Manfred sees or feels a spirit of the Alps ; but these
are details. The only thing that matters is the ensoul-
ment of the earth as a whole. No doubt its spirit-part
is divided up somehow, correspondent to its material

H

106 IS THE EARTH ALIVE?

conformation, as our spirits are divided from each
other. The division, however, is not a hermetic sealing
off. The universe is continuous. Indeed its parts
are inter-penetrative, for every particle influences
every other particle — and a thing cannot act where it is
not. Similarly, human beings are found to have modes
of communication other than those hitherto recognised
by orthodox science, and are somehow able to influence
others without regard to distance. We seem to be
connected with each other in the unseen, subliminal,
spiritual region. Our separateness is illusory. So
with individualisations of earth-features. They have
individual aspects, both on the physical and spiritual
side ; but they are part of the one earth and its one
spirit, as we ourselves are. And that earth-spirit is
part of the universe-spirit or God, as the human spirit
is part of the earth-spirit.

It is perhaps difficult, at first, to think of the earth
as having a life and consciousness of its own, for we
are located at little points, and do not see it whole,
nor do we see from the inside. We are like an eye
which looks at the body of which it forms a part, and
finds it difficult to believe in auditory, tactile, olfactory
experience ; more difficult still to conceive of pure
thought, emotion, will. If the earth seems a dead
lump, however, think of the human brain. It is a
mere lump of whitish filaments, seen from outside.
But its inner experience is the rich and infinitely de-
tailed life of a human being. So also may the inner
experience of the earth be incomparably richer than
its outer appearance indicates to our external senses.
Objectively, our brains are part of the earth : sub-
jectively, we see in ourselves a part of what the earth
sees in itself.

In thinking of the earth as an organised being, we
must guard against the error of the ancients who called

IS THE EARTH ALIVE ? 107

it an animal. It is not an animal. It is a Being of a
higher character than any animal, for it includes all
animals and all human beings, comprising in its spirit
all their spiritual activities, and having its own activities
as well. We are to it, as our blood-corpuscles are to us ;
and to think of the earth-spirit as being like our spirits
would be equivalent to a blood-corpuscle thinking of its
containing body as another corpuscle, only bigger.
Whereas the truth is that a man has feelings and cogni-
tions and purposes, and performs acts, which the
corpuscles cannot in the least comprehend. (Some-
what similarly, a drop cannot have waves, or a small
celestial body an atmosphere ; the lower cannot have
what the higher has, nor can it understand it.) The
corpuscle may know or believe that its conscience or
intuition is a sort of leakage down to it, of the mind
or will of its greater self (the voice of its God) , and that
in so far as it does its duty according to its lights it is
assisting the purposes of that higher Being of which
it forms a part J and this faith is its highest wisdom.
So with us. Human duty, done sincerely according
to our lights, is furthering the purposes of the higher
Being in whom we live and move. This faith is our
highest wisdom concerning our relation to the earth -
spirit. We see, then, that there is a good deal of sense
in faith and intuition. They are rationally justified.
By them we are dimly in touch with the over-soul on
our inner side : not really dimly, for the connection
is close and real, but dimly to our normal consciousness.
The connection via intellect is an external, round-about
affair, necessary and useful, but different. We need
to cultivate both. This is the essence of the philosophy
of Bergson. There is more than one way of receiving
truth. Science is apt to overlook the intuitional way
On this conscience-side or moral aspect, the Fech-
nerian idea is particularly ~ fruitful and illuminating.

io8 IS, THE EARTH ALIVE?

The analogy of our own mind is once more the key —
the mirror wherewith to view the greater landscape,
the village wherefrom to draw inferences about nations.
In childhood, the world is, as James said, a big, bloom-
ing, buzzing confusion : sensations pour in quite un-
connected ; the baby sees the moon, and stretches out
an arm to grab it, thus learning that it is not grabable.
It is only gradually that the child learns to associate
sounds with sights ; to know what sounds indicate its
mother's presence or proximity, and what sounds its
father's. Gradually, individual experiences get linked
up and harmonised. Then other disjointednesses
arise. Foolish impulses war against better judgment
and parents' advice, and the youth's mind is " torn ",
as we say, very aptly describing the feeling. Growing
older and wiser, his mind becomes more unified and
consequently more calm. His powers are marshalled
and directed consciously at a goal or goals. Wayward
impulses are reined in. We feel that poise and strength
and wisdom are attained : never perfectly and ideally,
but at least to a considerable degree, as compared with
the earlier state.

So with the earth-spirit. Being far greater than the
human subsidiary spirits, it is longer in coming to
maturity. Its elements are still largely at loggerheads
with each other. The nations war against each other,
and universal peace seems a long time in coming. But
steadily, steadily works the earth-spirit, and the
nations almost unconsciously — like somnambulists —
carry out its will. They are working, consciously or
unconsciously, towards universal at-one-ment. A
League of Nations has arisen, and the Federation of
the World is in sight. Union is the political watch-
word. Labour is combining throughout the world.
East is learning from West, and West from East.

IS THE EARTH ALIVE? 109

China sends her students to Oxford, Cambridge, Paris,
Harvard, and welcomes Western methods. India
repays our civilising with the poems of Tagore. In
trade, thousands of small businesses are unified in a
few great combines, preparing for some sort of Socialism.
Finance spreads its world-wide network. Science is
becoming international. The frontiers are melting ;
coalescence, unity, harmony are being achieved. The
earth-spirit is reconciling its warring elements. When
it succeeds in the complete reconciliation ; when the
era of universal peace and brotherhood shall dawn ;
when it reaches its huge equivalent of the ripe, calm,
contented wisdom of human age — ah, then will come a
state of things which we can but dimly prefigure. But
it will come. The age of gold is in the future, not the
past. It is our duty and our privilege to hasten the
coming of this millennium. And even this is not the
end. We cannot conceive the things that shall be.
Eye hath not seen, or ear heard. Enough for us to
know the tendency, and to trust ourselves to it, actively
co-operating.

Before beginning, and without an end,

As space eternal, and as surety sure,

Is fixed a Power divine which moves to good,

Only its laws endure.

This is its touch upon the blossomed rose,
The fashion of its hand shaped lotus-leaves ;
In dark soil and the silence of the seeds
The robe of Spring it weaves.

It maketh and unmaketh, mending all ;
What it hath wrought is better than had been ;
Slow grows the splendid pattern that it plans,
Its wistful hands between.

This is its work upon the things ye see :
The unseen things are more ; men's hearts and minds,
The thoughts of peoples and their ways and wills,
Those, too, the great Law binds.

— Sir Edwin Arnold, Light of Asia,

no IS THE EARTH ALIVE?

Is it asked : " Who is the Law-giver, and to what end
is the Law ? " The question is foolish. Parts cannot
know wholes, and the whole does not want parts to be
anything but what they obviously are. Each fits
into its place, and can do useful work there. Let
it keep to tasks " of a size with its capacity " — as
& Kempis says — and leave the rest. " What doth the
Lord require of thee but to do justly and to love mercy
and to walk humbly with thy God ? "

RELIGIOUS BELIEF AFTER THE WAR

THERE is naturally and rightly a great deal of
anxiety in the minds of most thoughtful
people as to the state of religion after the
war. The old order seems to have come down in chaos
about our ears, and we are wondering what shape the
new building will take. Even our clergy, or some of
them, are honestly confessing that beliefs can never
be just the same again; to name only two things,
they feel that the literal acceptance of the non-resist-
ance doctrine is no longer unqualifiedly possible, as
many were formerly inclined to maintain ; for the
aggression of Germany has made clear the necessity
of resisting evil ; second, that the old Protestant
doctrine of immediate heaven or hell cannot satis-
factorily be applied to many of the millions of young
fellows who have gone over ; some idea of more gradual
progress through an intermediate state seems more
reasonable. But will this be sufficient ? Shall we
jog on again, after this world-shaking cataclysm, with
such a very microscopical trimming — such an almost
imperceptible sail-reefing — as this ? Will not rather
the whole theological scheme have to be remodelled ?
Can nations which have suffered as the belligerents
have suffered — even those at home, still more the
brave lads who have gone through experiences such as
they never dreamed of in their worst nightmares —
can these people, even if they wish, accept the old
scheme, or anything like it ?

I am not going to try to answer such a large question

ii2 RELIGIOUS BELIEF AFTER THE WAR

directly. Mr Wells has attempted something of the
sort in his book, God the Invisible King, and he pro-
phesies a religious revolution. It may come as he
thinks, but it is perhaps more probable that, in spite
of the most earth-shaking events, a certain continuity
of thought will be maintained. New religions are not
manufactured complete while you wait, like Pallas
emerging full-armed from the head of Zeus ; or, if
they are, by such brilliant Olympians as Mr Wells,
they do not get themselves accepted. But there
probably will be enough of a change to be called
a very considerable thought-revolution, even allowing
for some inevitable continuity ; and inasmuch as each
expression of opinion counts as a datum and as a
directive agency, I venture to make my prophecy.
And I avoid the negative side, also any argument as
to whether or why this or that particular doctrine will
become obsolete ; I think it better to let obsolescent
beliefs drop quietly into their limbo, and to concern
ourselves with the living ones that will replace them.
First and most important, the idea of God. We
have heard, over and over again, the pathetic cry :
" Why does God permit such things ? Surely He must
be either not All-good or not Almighty ? " And one
hears of men, even among the clergy, whose minds have
been clouded by this difficulty. Mr Wells solves the
problem in the fashion of J. S. Mill and the late William
James, by postulating a finite god, a good being who is
doing his best but who is struggling with a refractory
material. To many people this seems a helpful
notion, for it saves God's goodness and gives a pleasur-
able sense of being co-workers with Him in His effort
to improve things. But to many of us it is unsatis-
factory. Indeed, if one could say such a thing of the
author of Bealby and of the most genial of modern

RELIGIOUS BELIEF AFTER THE WAR 113

philosophers, we might say that the finite-god idea seems
impossible to anyone with a sense of humour. Is it
not really rather ridiculous of us to decide so solemnly
that God is no doubt a good fellow but that He is having
a tough time of it in fighting Satan, and that there does
not seem to be any certainty of His winning ? Per-
haps the idea appeals to adventurous spirits like Wells
and James because it has an air of being a sporting
event, and promises excitement ; but, I repeat,
is it not a rather ridiculous proposition for us small
creatures to make ? " Finite " and " Infinite " are
words ; I am not sure that they have any very clear
meaning. As to " infinite " in particular, the idea is only
a negative one ; we think of something finite, and then
say "it is not that ". But even of " finite " ', can we
say that it has any useful clear meaning ? The pen
with which I write this may be said to be finite, for I
can give its dimensions, and in many ways can define
the limits of its powers. But inasmuch as every par-
ticle in it attracts every other particle of matter in the
universe, the little pen's finiteness or infinity depends
on whether the universe itself is finite or infinite ;
and that is a bigger question than our small wits can
settle. And if it is so with a pen, will it not be more so
with greater things ?

We measure things against the foot-rule of our own
selves. We can imagine something much greater than
those selves, both physical and spiritual. But when
it comes to conceiving the whole physical universe
of which we form an insignificant part, I do not feel
that we can know whether it is finite or not. It is too
big for our foot-rule. Even when dealing with the
distances of the stars, we realise that the billions of
miles which we can talk about so glibly do not convey
much to our minds. We can think of a distance of a

ii4 RELIGIOUS BELIEF AFTER THE WAR

few miles fairly clearly, recalling how long it takes us
to wralk so far ; but greater distances soon become
mere figures, not representing anything that we can
picture. And when we reach the conception of the
whole physical universe, we get quite out of our depth.
We do not know whether it is finite or infinite ; we
know only that it is inconceivably greater than we are.
So with the spirit which energises through it. Be-
ginning with what we know best, we find ourselves
acquainted with a world of mental phenomena bound
together in and by what we call our self. Whatever
we think of Hume's argument that a mass of experi-
ences do not involve a soul that has them, it is reason-
able and useful to have a name for the active thing which
perceives and thinks and acts and feels, whether we
call it soul or spirit or mind or self or x. It is some-
thing which maintains a sort of identity, in spite of
growth and change ; and it is marked off from other
selves. John Smith has John Smith's experiences,
not William Jones's. This individual spirit energises
through each of our bodies. Of our own spirit we
have a very close knowledge, of other spirits we have a
rather more remote knowledge from inference ; we
infer their states of mind from the states of body which
we observe, or from the material effects which they
cause in speaking or writing. Passing from the inferred
human spirits (inferred because certain lumps of matter
act in a way similar to that of the lumps which we call
our own bodies), we come to other and larger and very
different pieces of matter such as planets. It may
seem at the first glance an absurd idea, but I for one
cannot think of matter as dead, or of a whole planet
without any soul except what is in the human bodies
which make up an infinitesimal portion of its mass.
It seems to me that there must be some sort of mind

RELIGIOUS BELIEF AFTER THE WAR 115

energising through the planet-mass as my^ own mind
energises through my body-mass. And, carrying the
idea further, we arrive at a conception of the whole
universe as ensouled by a Being who in the material
immanent manifestation is the Logos of the Christian
doctrine, but who also transcends the material part as
indeed the Christian doctrine teaches. This spirit,
transcending the physical universe as well as energising
through it, is greater in comparison with our spirits than
the physical universe is in comparison with our bodies.
Therefore, once more, and to a greater degree,we are out
of our depth. To throw words like finite and infinite
at such a Being is to make ourselves ridiculous. It is
like a microbe sticking its own adjective-labels — if
it has any- on a man, whom the microbe's vocabulary
as a matter of fact will not apply to. God is too great
for our measure. He is high as heaven ; what canst
thou do ? deeper than Sheol ; what canst thou know ?
The measure thereof is longer than the earth, and
broader than the sea — yea, than the whole universe
itself.

This conclusion of Zophar the Naamathite, acquiesced
in by Job at the end of the argument, seems to some
minds an evaporation of God into an Absolute without
any human attributes. We feel the necessity or at
least the desirability of regarding Him as good, loving,
etc., and we shrink from any de-personalisation. But
there is a way out of the difficulty. God is incomprehen-
sible, as the Creed says ; parts cannot comprehend
wholes. But there is something deep in us, call it
what you will, which tells us that our ideals of Good,
Truth, and Beauty are divine ; are God in so far as
we are able to cognise Him. Good, true, beautiful
actions and thoughts are God manifested through our
personal limitations ; they are rainbow colours broken

n6 RELIGIOUS BELIEF AFTER THE WAR

out of the pure white light of God. We do right to
worship them. They are the highest we can compre-
hend, though we may reach lame hands of faith to the
apprehension of the Unconditioned. But this is a
very great mystery, revealed only to the mystic. And
it is a dangerous path, for by reaching " beyond good
and evil " we lose touch with humanity and with the
virtues we can exercise, risking the insanity to which
Nietzsche so logically succumbed. We may dimly
apprehend the Incomprehensible, but we must live
and work among comprehensibilities. That is what
we are here for. God is conceived by us — and rightly
so conceived— as Good, Truth, Beauty, though we can
see that as He really is He must transcend them.
Mr Wells's distinction between the Finite God and the
Veiled Being is not an ultimate. The two are one,
seen as two because of our limitations. They are the
rainbow and its source. The sun cannot be looked
upon directly, but only when dimmed or reflected.

Then as to immortality. The deaths of so many of
our best, and the sorrow thus brought into almost
every home, force this question into prominence. If
blank pessimism is to be avoided, many people feel that
they must have some assurance of the continued ex-
istence of those who have made the supreme sacrifice
— a sacrifice at the call of duty, greater probably than
any sacrifice ever made by us of the older generation
who have lived in the smooth times of peace. We feel
that if these magnificent young lives have come to
nought, have been wasted, there is no rational religious
belief possible to us. Accordingly we inquire about
immortality. And, curiously enough, Science, which
in the last generation tended to deny or discredit
individual survival of bodily death, now gives a quite
opposite verdict. Psychical research brings forward

RELIGIOUS BELIEF AFTER THE WAR 117

scientific evidence for that welcome belief. It seems
too good to be true ; but it is true. Public opinion
has not yet fully accepted it — nor is it well that opinion
should change too rapidly — for it was well drenched
in materialism during the heyday of physical science
and its astonishing applications in the latter part of the
nineteenth century, but the leaders of thought in almost
all branches — scientific, legal, literary, and what not —
are now admitting that the evidence is at least sur-
prising, and those who have studied it most are one by
one announcing that it is convincing. There are many
questions yet to solve, such as the nature and occupa-
tions of the future life, concerning which there are
different views, and the problems may turn out to be
insoluble ; but the main problem seems on the way
to be settled. The survival of human personality is a
fact. And the indications, so far as we have got,
suggest that the next stage is a life of opportunity,
work, progress, even more than the present one. There
is much to be thankful for in even this only incipient
revelation. It is salvation great and joyous, to those
reared amid unacceptable theories of a blank material-
ism or the much more dreadful hell-doctrines of the
theologians.

The religion of the coming time, then, seems likely
to be mainly based on these two articles, belief in God
in the way indicated, and belief in survival and pro-
gress on the other side. Both beliefs are empirical,
and are thus in harmony with the temper of our time.
They begin with the things which are most real to us,
first the fact of conscious experience, then the external
world, and reason upward therefrom, instead of
beginning with metaphysical entities and attributes,
and reasoning down — and failing to establish contact
with the material world. Religious experience there

n8 RELIGIOUS BELIEF AFTER THE WAR

still may be, and this may give rise to quite new and
unexpected forms of belief or worship ; but on the whole
the tendency of thought for the last three hundred
years has been increasingly empirical, and the success
of the method is likely to ensure its continuance. It
may be true that the ideal world is the more real —
probably it is that out of thought's interior sphere
these phenomenal wonders of the world rose to upper
air, as Emerson says ; but for us in the present circum-
stances the way back to universe-spiritualisation is
via experience (and mainly sense-presentations) care-
fully observed and studied. If these scientific methods,
which are open to everybody, can lead to belief in God
and a spiritual world to which we pass at death, it
seems unnecessary to return to the bad old days when
sporadic experiences of this or that ecstatic, or logic-
chopping by this or that theologian, led to beliefs and
cults of widefy differing character according to the
idiosyncracy of the writer. A method which is open
to all and the rules of which are agreed on will be likely
to yield something like unanimity. The churches
may yet form one fold, if they will ; in which, with
variations to satisfy different aesthetic or symbolistic
needs, all souls may find the answer to their queries,
healing for their sorrow, and scope for their reverence
and love ; in a word, salvation.

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